The gulf between what designers envision and what engineers build has long been one of software development's enduring frustrations. Enter Dessn, a London-based startup that thinks it has found a way to collapse that gap entirely—by letting designers work directly inside the code itself.
On May 12, 2026, the company announced it had raised $6 million in a funding round led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks and N49P. It's a notable bet on a counterintuitive premise: that the future of design tooling isn't about creating better mockups, but about eliminating mockups altogether.
Founded in 2024 by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn takes a company's React codebase, spins it up in a secure cloud environment, and gives designers and product managers the ability to manipulate real components, adjust design tokens, and tweak typography—all without writing a single line of code. More importantly, perhaps, without breaking anything.
The platform is read-only by design. Designers can iterate on interfaces using the actual component libraries and design systems that ship to customers, but the underlying code remains untouchable. Under the hood, Dessn's engine—which the company has named "Cortex," according to investor N49P—abstracts away local dependencies and renders production codebases in a way that non-technical team members can safely navigate.
It's a different proposition than the wave of AI-powered interface generators that have captured attention recently. Tools like Lovable or Vercel's v0 conjure up interfaces from scratch, often impressive but detached from existing code. Dessn, by contrast, is built for teams already deep in their own systems. Pietro Bezza, managing partner at Connect Ventures, frames it as designing in production rather than designing toward it—a subtle shift in preposition that carries significant implications for workflow.
The four-person team has managed to attract early adopters that suggest real traction: health tech company Color, voice AI startup Wispr, and fintech platform Mercury are among the customers already onboard. More than 1,600 companies are reportedly waiting to get in, according to N49P.
Jordan Crook, a partner at Betaworks, pointed to what she sees as the tool's core advantage: "perfect fidelity within the code base/production," eliminating the translation errors that plague traditional design-to-development handoffs. Some users, she noted, are spending upwards of five hours daily in the product—a metric that suggests either genuine utility or, perhaps, workflows still finding their shape.
Dessn now offers tiered pricing. There's a free version (limited to one compiled repository and five prompts per week), followed by paid plans starting at $39 per user monthly. A Teams tier runs $139 per user per month, with enterprise pricing negotiated separately. The company has secured SOC2 Type II certification and pledges not to store or use customer code for model training—a reassurance that matters in an era when every startup seems to be feeding data into some AI somewhere.
The company's geography tells its own story. Born in Montréal, relocated from New York to London, it now describes itself as "growing in London," though what exactly prompted the trans-Atlantic moves remains unclear. Looking ahead, the team plans integrations with Slack and the meeting notetaker Granola.
Notably absent from the roadmap? Any integration with Figma, the design tool that has become nearly ubiquitous in product teams. It's a deliberate omission. Dessn's philosophy appears to be that maintaining parallel design files defeats the purpose. Whether that stance will resonate with teams accustomed to Figma's collaborative features—or alienate them—remains to be seen.
The broader question is whether designers will embrace working directly in code, even when abstracted. It's one thing to promise a seamless experience; it's another to convince people to abandon familiar tools and mental models. But with $6 million in the bank and a waitlist stretching into four figures, Dessn has at least bought itself time to find out.
