Dessn’s €5 Million Funding Boosts Real Codebase Design and Prototyping for Product Teams

Dessn, a cutting-edge AI design-in-production platform based in London, has successfully secured €5 million ($6 million) in funding to establish a global community of product builders and enhance its team.

The funding round was spearheaded by Connect Ventures, with contributions from Betaworks, N49P, and other prominent investment firms.

“The most successful product founders are highly technical and innovative. They create products that enable users to express themselves in ways that truly resonate with them. They design without limitations and push the boundaries of what is currently achievable, positioning themselves as pioneers of tomorrow. We are thrilled to collaborate with Gabriella and Nim as they strive to revolutionize product development,” stated Pietro Bezza, the Managing Partner at Connect Ventures.

Established in 2024 by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn is an AI design-in-production platform that empowers product teams to design, prototype, and explore directly within their authentic codebase.

“Unlike other AI design tools that attempt to replicate products, Dessn immerses users in the actual product – their real app, genuine components, and authentic design system – allowing designers and product managers to prototype effortlessly on top of it, all without any technical setup,” highlighted the company in a press release.

According to Dessn, a primary challenge faced by product teams stems from the disconnect between designers and product managers focusing on mock-ups, documents, and screenshots, while developers work directly with code, and users engage with the final product in production. This gap often results in wasted time, decreased fidelity, and missed opportunities, as noted by Dessn.

Traditionally, accessing the production environment required coding knowledge, setting up a local workspace, and interacting with the product through developer interfaces. Dessn flips this paradigm by starting from the codebase and constructing a design environment around it, enabling designers and PMs to create prototypes using the company’s actual components, design system, and production context seamlessly, without the need for an IDE or local code execution.

Addressing security concerns, Dessn emphasized its SOC2 Type II certification. Each project operates within its isolated microVM, devoid of any training. The platform never alters or writes code back to the user’s repository, only necessitating read-only access to the codebase. When users link their repository, Dessn’s control plane solely requests the scoped access approved by users (read-only).

Currently, teams at Color, Wispr, Mercury, and other companies leverage Dessn to prototype directly in production, with some users devoting more than five hours daily to the platform.

Looking ahead, Hachem shared, “LLMs are non-deterministic: the same input can yield multiple valid outputs. This implies that your product isn’t fixed; it’s a realm of possibilities. Once Dessn can render your components and design system, every conceivable version of your product already exists within the model. The challenge lies in exploring these possibilities, which is the most enjoyable aspect of product development.”