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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

At Resolve we’re building the future of collaboration and review for the construction industry. 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 collaboratively reviewing complex facilities on the web and 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.

Alkali is building the co-pilot for chemical process design. Spot design errors earlier, get the right equipment sooner, and build chemical projects faster.

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 started with HeroUI, an open-source library that provides React developers with a set of 44 components to create beautiful and accessible interfaces. Now, we’re expanding our vision with HeroUI Chat (heroui.chat), an AI-powered platform that helps developers and teams build beautiful frontends in minutes

Creative intelligence

In the space of AI coding agents, Anima bridges the LLM design gap. With over 1.5 million installs, Anima is the first option for professional design, product, and R&D teams going from design to code. Thanks to On-brand Vibe-coding, anyone in the team can build fast without breaking your look and feel. No Figma skills required. Anima generates clean and developer-friendly code. So your prototypes could also be used for handoff. Three ways to start - Figma to Code → Instantly generate clean React, HTML, or Vue code from Figma designs. - Website to Code (Cloning / Remixing) → Import any live website and turn it into editable code. - Prompt to Design (coming soon) → Generate high-end UI directly from natural language prompts, automatically styled to your brand. Key features - Start at AnimaApp.com to bring your design or your website to Anima - Chat in Anima playground to iterate on your project's code while staying on-brand - Handoff playground link to engineering - Or, download code to continue with Clause code ot Cursor - Or, publish a public link to share with clients or stakeholders

Prototypes that look exactly like your product. Capture your product from the browser instantly and build lifelike, interactive AI prototypes. Perfect for Product Managers, Founders, and Designers.

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.

Our mission is to give small businesses an AI Graphic Designer to help them create a brand and identity without having to pay 💰💰💰 of dollars hire someone.

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.

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”.

Iliad is an AI tool for creating stylized artwork, textures, illustrations, and 3D assets. Users sketch, upload images, or write prompts, then guide results with visual controls like brushstrokes, masks, and transform sliders. Iliad is built for artists, game developers, and designers.

Stewdio is a collaborative platform for creative teams to use all the latest image + video generation models in one place. Music video directors, ad agencies, and architects use Stewdio to create everything from rap videos for Quavo and Loco, advertising storyboards, to architectural renderings.

The AI IDE for front-end development. Modify styles, move elements, and have changes automatically reflected in your codebase.

Onlook is the fastest way for anyone to build, deploy, and iterate on websites and web apps. We built an open-source, visual editor for code that merges design, development, and AI. Since launching, Onlook hit #1 on Hacker News, was the #1 trending repo on GitHub—above DeepSeek—and has earned over 8,500 GitHub stars. 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.

Topological is developing physics-based foundation models for CAD optimization. We help hardware teams iterate at the same speed that software teams do. Our technology is accelerating the engineering workflow with AI and scales design and optimization to identify the ideal designs for complex problems given their physical constraints with enhanced speed and performance. Our first model, UToP-v1, is a SOTA topology optimization model that understands physics, geometry, and manufacturability. It can generate the most efficient design given a problem’s physical requirements. It has <5% compliance error and is 1930x faster than current methods. We're reimagining mechanical engineering and computational design with precision spatial AI.

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

We created Ruby, an AI Product designer who improves your product while you sleep. You can assign Ruby design tasks right in slack, like optimizing a flow or creating a new page. She clarifies requirements, researches, designs multiple options, iterates with you, and ships PRs to your codebase. She will then monitor performance and suggest future improvements. She’s like Devin, but for Product Design work.

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.

Semble AI automates fire-life-safety design. Instantly generate code-compliant device layouts, bills of materials (BOMs), and quote estimates. Replace guesswork with AI - getting it right the first time and allowing teams to produce bids in minutes, not weeks. No missed devices or materials. No regulation lookups. No back-and-forth with permitting authorities. No overrun cost surprises. Semble AI is the new standard for fire-life-safety.

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

Rivet is a visual tool that sits above a codebase. It's a bridge that lets product designers own any UI change to the software they work on. Designers use Rivet today to shortcut painful design handoffs and just make any visual change themselves. This saves time for designers and engineers and makes it radically easier to build software with great design and taste. This becomes the next design tool because it lets designers break out of static tools and prototype like frontend engineers. Use real components from your existing codebase to design remarkably complex interactions, and then ship it yourself.

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.

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

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.