London’s Dessn raises €5 million to help product teams design and prototype inside real codebases

Dessn, a London-based AI design-in-production platform, has raised €5 million ($6 million) to build a global community of product builders and expand the team.

The round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks, N49P, and other leading funds. 

“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,” said Pietro Bezza, Managing Partner at Connect Ventures.

Founded in 2024 by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn is an AI design-in-production platform that lets product teams design, prototype, and explore directly inside their real codebase. 

“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 (PMs) prototype directly on top of it. Together, with zero technical setup,” mentioned the company in the press release. 

The company states that the main challenges for product teams arise because designers and PMs focus on mocks, docs, and screenshots, while developers work in code, and users experience the product in production. The gap is where most product teams lose time, fidelity, and good ideas, notes Dessn. 

According to the company, historically, the only way to access production was to know how to code, set up a local environment, and interact with the product through a developer’s interface. Dessn claims to flip the model. Instead of starting in a design tool and trying to translate back into code, Dessn starts from the codebase and builds a design environment around it. 

Designers and PMs create prototypes directly using their company’s actual components, design system, and production context, without needing to open an IDE or run any code locally. Dessn calls this “the localhost problem“, and solving it is what separates the product from MCP-style integrations or “upload your design system theme” workarounds, says the UK startup. 

Explaining the security features, Dessn stated that it is SOC2 Type II certified. The company states that each project runs in its own isolated microVM and is not trained on. It never writes, modifies, or pushes code back to the user’s repo. It only requires read-only access to the user’s codebase. When users connect to a repository, Dessn’s control plane requests only the scoped access that the users approve (read-only).

The company states that, today, teams at Color, Wispr, Mercury, and others utilise Dessn to prototype directly in production, with some users dedicating over five hours daily to the product.

Talking about what comes next, Hachem 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.”

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