Dessn Raises €5M To Simplify Product Design And Prototyping In Real Codebases

The funding round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks, N49P, and several other investors.

Founded in 2024 by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn enables product teams to design, prototype, and experiment directly within their live codebase.

The company says product teams often struggle because designers and product managers work with mockups, documentation, and screenshots, while developers operate in code and users interact with the final production product. According to Dessn, this disconnect is where teams lose valuable time, product fidelity, and innovative ideas.

Traditionally, accessing a production environment required coding knowledge, setting up a local development environment, and navigating developer-focused interfaces.

Dessn aims to change that approach by building a design environment around the codebase itself, rather than starting in a separate design tool and translating designs back into code.

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With Dessn, designers and product managers can create prototypes using their company’s real components, design systems, and production context without opening an IDE or running code locally.

The startup describes this challenge as the “localhost problem” and says solving it differentiates the platform from MCP-style integrations or design-system upload workarounds.

On the security front, Dessn says it is SOC 2 Type II certified. Each project operates within its own isolated microVM, and user data is not used for AI training.

The platform never writes, modifies, or pushes code back to customer repositories and only requires read-only access to the codebase. When users connect a repository, Dessn requests only the scoped permissions explicitly approved by the user.

The company says teams at Color, Wispr, Mercury, and others are already using Dessn to prototype directly in production, with some users reportedly spending more than five hours a day on 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,” said Pietro Bezza, Managing Partner at Connect Ventures.