Dessn, a London-based design-in-production startup, has raised £4.5 million in funding led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks, N49P, and other investors. Founded in 2024 by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn has built a platform that lets product teams design, prototype, and explore directly inside their real codebase.
The platform is designed to address what Dessn describes as a disconnect between designers and product managers working in mocks, documents, and screenshots, while developers work in code and users experience products in production. Instead of recreating products in separate design tools, Dessn starts from the codebase and creates a design environment around it using a company’s actual components, design system, and production context.
According to Dessn, designers and product managers can prototype directly on top of real applications without opening an IDE or running code locally. The startup refers to this challenge as the “localhost problem”, which it says separates the platform from MCP-style integrations or design system upload approaches.
Security and infrastructure controls outlined by Dessn include SOC2 Type II certification, isolated microVM environments for each project, and read-only access to customer repositories. Dessn stated that projects are not used for training and that the platform never writes, modifies, or pushes code back to user repositories.
Teams at Color, Wispr, Mercury and other companies are using the platform to prototype directly in production environments, according to Dessn. The startup stated that some users spend more than five hours per day using the product.
Speaking about the future direction of the platform, Gabriella Hachem said that large language models create multiple valid outputs from the same input, turning products into “a space of possibilities” that teams can explore directly once components and design systems can be rendered inside the platform.
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.
Every other AI design tool tries to recreate product. Dessn brings users into the real thing - your actual app, your actual components, your actual design system - and lets designers and product managers prototype directly on top of it. Together, with zero technical setup.
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.
