Design Tools Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2025

Zeplin is an organized workspace to publish finalized designs, where the entire team can collaborate to ship beautiful products together. We were founded in 2014 and today we are honored to support 5+ million users from thousands of product teams including Apple, Starbucks, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft, Audi and many more. We’re a Y Combinator startup, also backed by amazing investors like Elad Gil, Mike Maples, Kevin Hale. We’re a distributed crew with offices in San Francisco, Istanbul and London. We're Hiring! Please apply directly on Zeplin's job site: https://zpl.io/jobs

Our mission is to empower everyone to build the internet. Universe is a magical new way to build websites –– it’s the first website builder designed for phones. Our app makes it easy for anyone to make a great looking website and start selling online in minutes from your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And we make it as fun as playing with Legos! Give it a try: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1211437633 Explore sites made on Universe: https://onuniverse.com/explore We are a remote-first 20+ person company with people all over the US. We were YC W18 and have raised $17.2MM in funding from Google Ventures, General Catalyst, Javelin Venture Partners, Box Group, and more top investors. We value individual agency and ownership –– which guides our product design and our company’s culture. While other companies offer lots of perks, we prioritize your freedom: work from anywhere, in the way you’re at your best. We believe that an individual’s capacity for growth is far larger than most understand, and we’ve designed an environment to support rapid, continuous learning. Ideas here come from everyone, initiative is respected, and quality matters. We are here to build something special and enduring.

Great Question puts customer research on autopilot - from recruiting participants, scheduling interviews, sending surveys or prototype tests - and sharing what you learn with your team. Companies like Adidas Runtastic, O'Reilly Media & MainStreet use us to put their customers at the center of their product, design & marketing decisions.

Sophris is your AI “engineer” for circuit board schematics, checking for errors—pin mismatches, connectivity gaps, or voltage conflicts—long before they derail your design. By flagging potential issues early, you can fix them ahead of production and avoid the frustrating re-spins that drive up costs and delay schedules. While traditional EDA tools offer basic ERC and DRC checks—like net connectivity and spacing—they don't dig deeply into component datasheets. Sophris takes it further, analyzing specs and cross-referencing design requirements from multiple sources. As a result, subtle pin misconfigurations, voltage mismatches, and datasheet-specific quirks that typical rule checks might miss are brought to light. By identifying design flaws during the schematic phase, Sophris helps you iterate confidently and deliver more reliable products. Faster turnarounds, fewer production surprises, and a smoother path from concept to manufacturing. With Sophris, design more confidently and ship more reliably.

SuperCraft lets anyone create professional designs with natural language Join thousands of designers using SuperCraft to craft compelling visual narratives via on-brand creatives, packaging, product design, architectural design, gaming and more

Add a line of code and get thousands of icons and social logos on your website instantly. Easy to set up, easy to use, and crazy powerful. Let us take care of the icons so you can get back to the important stuff. Font Awesome. Go make something Awesome.

From MIT's App Inventor and YCombinator's W2016 batch, Thunkable allows anyone to build powerful native apps. With Thunkable, it's simple to design, and simple to code-- simply drag and drop to create fast, native, reliable apps. You don't need to download large development suites, command-line kits, or simulators. You can use the many built-in app templates as they are, or make changes. Make your changes online and see them on your device instantly with the Thunkable mobile app. Upload your apps directly to the Play Store or App Store or send them to friends!

Vigilant is a lightweight tool for managing structured logs. It lets you centralize your logs, search them, and get alerted when things break. We're focused on nailing the basics so setup and debugging feels as fast and intuitive as an IDE.

We're building a visual application development platform to dramatically improve the time to market and quality of digital experiences. FlutterFlow helps companies and product teams improve developer efficiency, accelerate project timelines, and reduce costs for large-scale business applications. Our customers include some of the largest banking, consulting, telecom, and manufacturing companies in the world. We have more than 1.3M users in more than 200 countries and regions around the world. We’re a remote first team headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have offices in Mountain View, New York City, and Singapore.

Unlayer makes embeddable email and web editing software. We provide the essential editing tools that companies need to create successful marketing and engagement campaigns. If you want to add a rich email template editor, web page builder, or popup builder into your application, try Unlayer.

renderlet is a framework that makes it easy to develop interactive applications. Building applications with high-performance graphics is very hard – existing tools are cumbersome and aren’t truly platform agnostic, leading to frequent rework. With renderlet, developers can write high-level code to describe 2D and 3D graphics without having to use low-level, platform-specific APIs. renderlet automatically compiles graphics code to WebAssembly and embeds a portable rendering engine inside any app, enabling graphics to safely and automatically render on any platform’s GPU. Our runtime is open-source: https://github.com/renderlet/wander

Designbase is the interface design tool that gives early teams design and development superpowers. Create stunning interfaces, immediately available as code, regardless of resources.

ReadMe provides every company the ability to easily create beautiful documentation, and build loyal, productive developer communities. With ReadMe, build developer portals that combine support, tutorials, topical guides and API exploration. ReadMe makes it trivial to keep docs up-to-date and has community oriented features that help drive adoption. Wanna see what it'd look like to work at ReadMe? Our careers page takes a stab at it! https://readme.com/careers

Magic Patterns helps software teams prototype their product ideas. Startups in the current batch and enterprises use us to create designs quickly and ship faster.

Adam is an AI CAD co-pilot for hardware design. It transforms plain text descriptions into parametric 3D models in seconds so engineering teams can ship 10x faster. Our mission is to eliminate the gap between engineering and reality so more great ideas come into existence.

You can think of BioRender as the ‘Figma/Canva for scientists’, with a suite of web-based graphics communication products to empower scientists to create beautiful scientific visuals and presentations with ease. BioRender is the world’s first tool to help scientists create and share beautiful, professional scientific figures. Our mission is to accelerate the world’s ability to learn, discover and communicate science. We are passionate about democratizing science communication in order to accelerate scientific discovery and understanding.

ideate.xyz is a graphics design as API platform. We help founders, marketing teams and agencies scale their marketing graphics design assets programmatically.

Easily create and publish 3D for multiple platforms. Build and iterate fast with production-ready results.

Rally is a User Research CRM that makes it easy for teams to do research with their users. By automating outreach, scheduling, incentives, and participant management, Rally replaces messy spreadsheets and disjointed tooling, saving teams hours each week.

Variant is building the state-of-the-art model for software design. Our first milestone, icon generation, already surpasses existing approaches. The company is founded by Ben South Lee, former VP of Product Design at unicorn companies Postmates ($5B exit) and Avara ($2.5B market cap), and Daniel Bulhosa Solórzano, Staff ML engineer at Square and Cruise.

At Resolve we’re building the future of simulations using immersive technology like VR and AR. Today, Resolve helps bridge the communication gap between people who operate buildings and those who design and build them. We've built the most robust application for reviewing industrial facilities on wireless VR devices like the Oculus Quest - our customers love it because it just works even with complex 3D building models. From data centers to cutting-edge biopharma facilities, Resolve provides a collaborative virtual environment for operations & maintenance teams to review and interact with 3D building models at full scale - decreasing late stage changes during the construction process and delivering a safer, more easily operable building. Our customers' facilities contain a multitude of complex systems which require careful coordination and review to ensure the building is completed on time and within budget. To prevent rework and increased building maintenance costs, Resolve fixes the broken system of screen-sharing 3D models and 2D floorplans with the operations teams that inherit the building and, instead, gives them easy access to their 3D building models before concrete is poured.

We're building Draftbit to make it easier for everyone to build, launch, and iterate on mobile apps. And do it without writing code, unless you want to. Over time, we hope to make building great looking, high quality apps as easy as (or easier than?!) launching a website is now. And by doing so, we hope to democratize software development, allowing anyone to turn their idea into reality, and build it into something great.

Manage the words across your team’s product from design to production.

Versive is an all-in-one research platform that helps teams make faster customer-informed decisions. - Collect richer insights: AI-moderated studies that deliver interview-quality results at the survey speeds - Accelerate your analysis: AI-assisted analysis that instantly turns transcripts into shareable insights

Tumult Inc. makes the next generation of designer tools to produce beautiful web content.

Superside is the leading Creating-as-a-Service company, and today helps 450+ ambitious brands like Google, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Coinbase get great design and creative done at scale. Superside is a fully remote tech-enabled creative company with 750 team members in 72 countries and 17 time zones. Superside delivers more reliable creative performance than any other solution on the market, and helps the world's leading brands with advertising, brand design and video. At Superside, our goal is to be the best at finding top creative talent anywhere in the world, and our promise is to build the fastest possible way to accelerate creative careers. We build technology to make it simple for customers to submit and manage projects, and to increase the productivity of our creative team. With a highly efficient operating model where we never do pitch work, never submit for awards and where we ensure 90+% team utilization, we are able to keep prices at around one third of the price of traditional advertising and design agencies. Since going through Y Combinator W16, Superside has raised capital from Luxor Capital, Prosus Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Slack Fund, Sam Altman, High Alpha and Alliance Ventures.

Tempo is a visual editor for react that gives PMs, designers, and engineers the ability to collaborate visually on code. It offers the familiar UX of a design tool but functions like an IDE under the hood. Tempo is optimized for Vite and Tailwind.

Supernova connects to popular design editors and interprets design systems into data. These data can then be transformed in powerful ways to create code for product development, for literally any coding stack or platform imaginable. These transformations can be fully automated so that when design changes occur, the code is automatically updated to reflect the changes. Developers can fully control how the code is rendered, literally down to the individual code characters. An ecosystem of Supernova-developed and community-maintained code export packages is available for popular stacks and platforms via the Supernova Store, or teams can choose to create their own — for instance, to support proprietary frameworks or to customize code output to meet any company guidelines.

We began with an open-source library for React developers that enables them to create beautiful and accessible interfaces (NextUI). We are now building Frontio a complete frontend-as-a-service platform to make building the frontend part of products easier, allowing teams to focus more on their product and less on design systems and frontend complexities (frontio.ai).

Photoroom provides photo editing software powerful enough to create outstanding images yet simple enough to be used without any training. We leverage deep learning to translate pixels into objects, drastically simplifying non-creative tasks such as removing backgrounds from images. Our mission: enable entrepreneurs and small businesses to compose images that stand out.

Anima is converting design to code, automatically. Why does the world need Anima? Taking user-interface design to production is hard. Automated design-to-code will change the way we build software. The future of Front-end With Anima, designers can translate design to code in a single click. - Need a website? Designers can create one directly from their design tool. Figma, Adobe XD, or Sketch. - Need to go from a prototype to a PoC asap? No coding required here as well. - For engineers, it's a coding assistant, keeping developers in control. Less grunt work, pushing-pixels, and design that is lost in translation.

Ficra enables product teams to ship higher quality releases, faster. Ficra is the source of truth for every product screen and user flow, giving companies real-time visibility into what their users actually see in their live product. Ficra's AI provides a live, visual map of your users’ journeys: every screen, flow, A/B test, push notification and email. With Ficra, product teams no longer waste 25% of their time auditing complex user flows to assess product quality and find the blind spots in funnels.

UX teams are scaling exponentially, but in order to scale effectively, they need to be able to reuse each other’s work. The problem is that right now, UX designers and developers don’t know what’s been done before and they end up rebuilding the same things – over and over. zeroheight integrates with UX tools and allows teams to document their work, so that it can be reused and they can deliver UX faster.

A guild of vetted designers that work directly with your startup to ship all your design needs.

Artifact is a 2D electrical system CAD tool leveraging AI to automate tedious, error-prone tasks: datasheet ingestion, multi-fidelity system design, and manufacturing documentation

Jitter is a fast and simple motion design tool on the web. We help designers create professional animations for communication content, videos, websites or apps easily, while collaborating with product & marketing teams. It's like “Figma for motion design”.

At Hive we worked on a product called Gencraft, an ai art generator we ramped from 0 to $1M ARR in 6 months. This inspired us to build supercontrast, an AI Copilot which empowers anyone to create and refine high quality designs and assets.

Iliad is a creative tool for generating images and 3D models. Iliad can make characters, environments, avatars, game icons, designs, backgrounds, textures, and materials. Right now, it's free for up to 50 images and 5 3D models per day. The transform setting gives you fully continuous, granular control over your generations, so you can color sketch out what you want and guide your visual ideas into refined images. It's the best image-to-image interface. It's easy to create detailed 3D meshes and voxel art from your images using the 3D pipeline.

Onlook is the open source Cursor for Designers – Making it easy for anyone to design directly in a live website and instantly write their changes in code. Onlook is the best way for designers, non-technical team members, and developers to collaborate, empowering teams to create incredible products and websites incredibly fast. Founded by Daniel Farrell, a designer of 10+ years and former Head of Growth, and Kiet Ho, an ex-Amazon and ex-ServiceNow engineer, Onlook is on a mission to finally solve the gap between design and development.

LightTwist is your virtual studio in the cloud. Record and stream video in a customizable virtual studio that you control from your browser.

ion design is re-imagining how front end works. For early stage companies, ion allows you to describe a UI in text & get react code that’s tailor-made to your business. ion understands your design system and codebase to generate designs that are beautiful and code that’s easy to work with. Once you've scaled and hired a designer, ion offers a pipeline that automatically converts Figma designs into clean React code that's tailor-fitted to your codebase. We re-use your existing components and variables from your codebase in our generations and can automatically generate PRs and merge conflicts from Figma.

Kindamagical is a recording + editing studio for making product content. We help users record, produce, and share product GIFs in minutes, that would otherwise take hours to produce with traditional tools.

atopile is a new language to design electronic circuit boards with code. We replace point and click graphical interfaces with code to bring software level automation and reuse to the field of hardware design. Our project is open source on GitHub! https://github.com/atopile/atopile

Ozone is the world’s first collaborative video editor in the cloud. We are making the world a more creative place by building the next generation of creative tools.

Visly is building a next generation design tool initially aimed at front-end engineers. We believe that with the proliferation if component driven software design and popularity of universal design systems it is the perfect time to build a tool like Visly. We enable engineers and designers to collaborate in a single tool and create high quality components that can be directly imported into code using existing tooling developers are used to. Compared to many other design tools we know that the secret to getting this to work well is building a tool engineers will love and building trust with the engineering community. Otherwise these components will never make it into a production code base.

ClipDrop is an app that turns regular mobile photos into professional product visuals. Thanks to companies like Poshmark, Etsy and Ebay, there are now over 25M sellers who need great visuals for their shops but most of them don’t have access to a professional photographer or a design team. We replace all of this with our app available on mobile and desktop. We’re a team of former Google, Facebook employees and Machine learning PhD’s and academic Professors. We believe that machine learning will bring professional photography and design to millions of businesses for a fraction of the cost.

Brainstorm, create, publish and manage content and advertisements on social media using 1 tool.

Easel was borne out of our frustration with the current state of design tools. Development tools have improved as the web has matured but design tools haven't. We started Easel because we want to create better design tools for the Web. Easel is a member of the Summer 2012 Y-Combinator batch and is located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Let AI turn your ideas into a website in minutes. Get content, structure, and style done for you, ready to edit and publish instantly.