Dessn, the collaborative product design platform, has raised $6 million in seed funding led by Connect Ventures, with participation from betaworks, N49P, and a group of angel investors including Declan Kelly, Roeland Delrue, Nicolas Steegmann, and Zoe Mohl. The round also includes support from Moxxie Ventures, which led the company’s pre‑seed, and reflects growing investor conviction in Dessn’s approach to unifying design and engineering workflows.
The company was co‑founded by Nim Cheema and Gabriella Hachem, who set out to rethink how modern product teams build software in an era where speed, accuracy, and cross‑functional alignment matter more than ever.
Dessn was built on the belief that the future of product development will not happen inside disconnected mockups, static prototypes, or recreated design environments. Instead, the company argues that real progress happens directly in production, where teams can work with the actual components, logic, and constraints that define a live product. Most competing tools attempt to replicate a product or design system in a separate environment, a process that Dessn’s founders say introduces misalignment, slows iteration, and leads to costly rework cycles when designs fail to match real‑world implementation.
By contrast, Dessn turns a codebase into a design environment in a single click, allowing entire product teams to design visually and collaboratively inside the real codebase with no setup required. This approach maintains a single source of truth across engineering, design, and product, eliminating the drift that often occurs between design files and production code.
The platform’s launch comes at a moment when the industry is paying closer attention to code‑native design workflows, especially following Anthropic’s introduction of Claude Design, which has accelerated interest in treating code as a first‑class design surface.
