Dessn raises £4.5m to prototype UIs from live components in codebases
This article covers Dessn, a London-based tech startup, which has raised £4.5m in a growth funding round to build a product that lets product teams design, prototype and explore directly inside their real codebase. The development aims to support product teams, designers and engineers by narrowing the gap between static design mocks and production code, reducing handoff friction and speeding iteration.
Dessn, a London-based design-in-production tech startup founded in 2024 by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, has raised £4.5 million in a growth funding round to build a product that lets product teams design, prototype and explore directly inside their real codebase. The raise matters because Dessn’s approach attempts to close the long-standing gap between designers working in mocks and developers working in code, a disconnect that can slow iteration and frustrate product teams.
Why it matters
Design and development workflows are often siloed: designers create static mocks or prototypes, product managers write requirements in documents, and engineers ship code that users ultimately experience. Dessn’s thesis is that starting from the actual codebase — rendering a company’s real components and design system — reduces friction, speeds iteration and produces more faithful prototypes. In an era where generative models produce many possible outputs from the same input, having a shared, accurate representation of the product becomes more important for decision making and exploration.
Inside the product
Dessn provides a design environment that sits on top of a customer’s repository and renders live components and design systems without requiring designers to open an IDE or run code locally. The company describes this as solving the “localhost problem” — the friction of reproducing a running app locally to test UI changes.
Security and infrastructure measures are positioned as central to the product: Dessn says it holds SOC2 Type II certification, creates isolated microVM environments per project, and only ever accesses repositories with read-only permissions. The company also states projects are not used to train models and the platform never writes, modifies or pushes code back to user repositories.
Early users include teams at Color, Wispr and Mercury, who are reportedly prototyping directly in production-aligned environments. Dessn says some customers use the platform for more than five hours per day, suggesting the tool is being integrated into day-to-day workflows rather than used sporadically.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks, N49P and other investors.
In the announcement, Pietro Bezza, Managing Partner at Connect Ventures, said:
The best product founders are overly technical and bold. They build products that let users express themselves in the ways they actually want to work. They design without constraints and push the limits of what is possible today so they will be first tomorrow. We are proud to partner with Gabriella and Nim in their mission to reinvent product building.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of tech venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of tech angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
In the announcement, Gabriella Hachem, Co-founder at Dessn, said:
LLMs are non-deterministic: the same input can produce many different, valid outputs. That means your product isn’t a single fixed thing. It’s a space of possibilities. Once Dessn can render your components and design system, every possible version of your product already exists in the model. The job becomes to explore it, which is the most fun part of building.
Hachem’s framing ties the product to current shifts in developer and design tooling driven by large language models and generative interfaces, positioning Dessn as a platform for exploration rather than a single-source-of-truth editor.
The bigger picture
Dessn’s raise sits at the intersection of two trends: increasing investment in tools that narrow the gap between code and design, and the growth of workflow products that lean on runtime fidelity rather than static exports. If designers can prototype against live components, teams may reduce handoff errors and accelerate experimentation — particularly valuable for startups racing to iterate.
The story also reflects where investor attention is landing in the UK and Europe: beyond headline-grabbing AI consumer apps, backers are placing bets on infrastructure and productivity tools that enable product teams to work faster and with greater alignment.
This round adds to a broader narrative of UK startups building developer- and design-focused tooling, and signals continued investor interest in companies that aim to make product development more collaborative and closer to production.
They've invested in Dessn
Get to know these tech investors
Click here for a full list of 7,589+ startup investors in the UK