Why we are reinvesting in the team redefining how products are designed and built
The handoff that never should have existed
For decades, product teams have lived with a fundamental fracture at the center of how software gets built. Designers work in static mocks. Developers work in code. Users live in production. Each world operates with its own version of the truth, and the seam between them, the "handoff," is where creative intent goes to die.
Every redline, every component translation, every time an engineer rebuilds what a designer already drew is a symptom of this disconnect. The industry has tried to patch it with better inspection tools and tighter plugins, but the underlying architecture remains broken. The design file and the codebase are still two separate realities.
Dessn flips the model
When we first invested in Dessn, co-founders Gab and Nim had a conviction that felt non-obvious at the time: the answer is not to turn designs into code. It is to turn code into a design environment.
Dessn's proprietary engine, Cortex, connects directly to a team's GitHub repository in just one click and turns it into a fully interactive visual environment. Dessn doesn't just extract components for you to then leave prod with. Designers and product managers work directly in the real codebase through a visual interface. No local setup, no translation layer, no handoff.
This is not incremental improvement on existing tools. It is an architectural inversion. Every prototype created in Dessn is a direct branch of the production codebase running in the cloud.
The market is validating the thesis
The traction since our initial investment has reinforced our conviction. Product teams at companies like Color, Wispr, and Mercury are actively using Dessn to design and prototype in production, with users saying "My productivity has gone up 1000x" and "I feel creative again". Over 1,600 companies are on the waitlist, including inbound interest from huge names - it's clear the market is excited for their problems to be solved.
The team has also shown exceptional resilience. After relocating their headquarters from New York to London, they turned the move into a strategic advantage, tapping into a deep pool of design-engineering talent in a city that hosts major offices for Canva, Figma, and Adobe.
N49P x Dessn
We are excited to announce our continued investment in Dessn's $6M round led by Connect Ventures, alongside Betaworks and other partners. We first backed Dessn because we believed the design-to-code gap was a generational problem waiting for a code-first solution. Everything we have seen since has deepened that belief.
If you are a designer, product manager, or engineer who wants to work directly in production without ever opening an IDE, Dessn is ready for you.
