announcing Paper’s $4.2M seed round, led by Accel

Today we’re excited to announce our seed round with the best partners we can imagine: Accel and Basecase, and many more incredible angels.

We love design and we see a new wave of challenges coming for designers. Right now it feels that our established tools are maturing into big business and are losing steam for new ideas. So we’re making it our mission to improve designer workflows every day, pushing forward creative expression and the speed with which we can explore our ideas.

Change is coming: AI advances daily, the job market is tight, and the tools we use are built for yesterday’s tasks. Plus we still have existing workflows to improve, like bridging the gap between design and development.

We see the designer’s role as more important than ever. That’s why we’re excited to build the tools that help creative professionals do their best work today and tomorrow.

We’re embarking on an age where Design and Engineering are converging quicker than ever. We need tools that propel us to where we’re going. The canvas where we work will be Paper.

Designers are the center of collaboration

The market is clear: designers need a collaborative-first tool with effortless sharing. This is because designers glue together stakeholders, engineers, and users. Designers discover and visualize what to build and translate it into a language that anyone can understand.

To serve this need, we’re building:

• A fast, reliable tool. Online, offline, in the browser, and in a desktop app.
• Sharing, multiplayer, branching, and comments re-imagined
• Even higher quality tools
  • Support for new color advancements like P3 gamut and uniform color spaces
  • Simpler token systems and the ability to nest slots in components
  • Pixel editing and filters

This is a unique moment to combine the best ideas from every design tool that has come before and to push forward with today’s technology.

We’re entering a new era of design—AI is reshaping how we create and build. I can’t wait to see how Paper empowers makers to experiment and build more efficiently.

Designing at the speed of your imagination

Using AI to help designers is still largely unsolved. Initial attempts have been clumsy, generating generic styles, or just too broad to be useful. Tools that generate code are great for quick prototypes, but don’t fit as well into team workflows.

We want to keep the designer in the loop and use AI to save time, clicks, and taps. AI can be used to produce effortless results with less input, but it’s key to generate with the original styles and matching to the designer’s intent. We want to reduce the effort between the idea to seeing the result, but keep the designer in the driver’s seat.

To this end, we’re building:

• Our AI pencil tool that lets you art direct your AI assistant, with voice or text instructions, sometimes with as little input as drawing an arrow or a number
• Design system aware AI that upscales low effort drawing into your styles
• Tools that create your vision while the AI assists in the boilerplate work

Really excited to see what Paper does, it’s the right time for someone to build this.

Everything you make in Paper will look the same in production

In the past, tools that promise to “bridge the gap” have asked designers to learn code concepts. We can all see that hand-off is wasteful and loses fine design details and it’s easy to assume designers should instead dial in HTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript.

But better hand-off can’t add constraints to your freedom of exploration. When you’re trying to solve “what’s the prior art?", “what do our competitors do?", and “what do our users need?", the last thing you want to interrupt you is “why is there a render bug in Safari mobile at 768px?".

Some voices are declaring that all designers will become design engineers. We don’t think so. That view is focused on UI components and ignores the 90% of the design work that comes before hand-off. AI will help turn design work into code, yes, but it’s the designer’s role to decide what to do, to steer the AI, apply taste, and make sure it’s cohesive to the brand and product.

To this end, we’re building:

• Import code components from GitHub or npm directly onto the design canvas so you don’t need to keep 2 copies of your design system
• Ship real assets, like shaders, layouts, and components exactly how you design them
• Design with real flex and CSS, no coding required. Then right click → Copy as React in full fidelity
• Tools that never sacrifice the design experience for the sake of code constraints

Join us

We’re so excited to spend our days building Paper. We’re a small team focused on making the best possible tools for designers. And we’ll be looking to add more people to the team soon. If these values resonate with you and you’re a builder who wants to do some of your life’s best work, we’d love to connect.

Show us your skills: join@paper.design

With gratitude and excitement,
Stephen and Vlad