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Paper Raises $34M to Build the Next Great Design Platform

Paper Raises $34M to Build the Next Great Design Platform

Design startupaiagents Paper
Design platform Paper raised $34M in Series A funding to build agent-centric infrastructure, claiming a 25x ARR surge following its desktop app launch.
What: Paper, led by founder Stephen, secured $34M from Accel and ICONIQ. The platform integrates with coding agents to allow designers to sync production code with an infinite canvas, serving customers like Ramp, Lovable, and Harvey.
Why it matters: This indicates a shift where design tools are moving away from static files toward being 'agent-aware' infrastructure that bridges visual design and live production code.
Deep dive
  • Paper raised $34M in Series A funding led by Accel and ICONIQ.
  • Total funding reached $38.5M, with participation from WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.
  • The platform focuses on 'agentic' design workflows, allowing teams to pull/push data directly from production environments.
  • Paper uses HTML/CSS as its primary rendering engine to improve agent compatibility.
  • The company is hiring for principal-level roles in product design, engineering, and operations.
  • Plans include expanding agent infrastructure and maintaining open-source projects like Paper Shaders and Paper Mono.
Decoder
  • Agentic era: A phase of software development where autonomous AI agents perform complex tasks instead of merely following human-provided steps.
  • MCP: Model Context Protocol, an open standard that allows AI assistants to securely connect to data sources and tools.
Original article

Paper raises $34M to build the next great design platform

Paper has raised $34M in our Series A financing from Accel and ICONIQ. We are building the best place for teams and agents to design software that stands out.

Paper has raised $34M in our Series A financing from Accel and ICONIQ.

We welcome new investors Designer Fund, Michael Grinich (CEO WorkOS), Anton Osika (CEO Lovable), engineers and designers from Anthropic and OpenAI, and more, alongside renewed support from Basecase, David Hoang, and Guillermo Rauch.

This brings Paper’s total funding to $38.5M.

Paper’s mission

Engineering is moving faster than ever. And every department is adopting coding agents. Paper’s mission is to help designers thrive in this agentic era. We want to help the world make quality software, not just more software.

We’ve been honored to help early customers like Ramp, Lovable, Harvey, and thousands more. Winning companies value design because design is how great businesses stand out from the noise.

I’ve seen very few tools in my career get the kind of love and organic adoption by industry leaders like Paper has had.

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel

The acceleration

After the Paper Desktop launch, we 25x’d ARR in a month, giving us rock-solid conviction: teams shipping with agents need a design tool built specifically for the new era.

We saw designers moving en masse to Claude Code, so we followed them to the desktop with Paper Desktop and MCP. Paper gives designers a high-quality, human-first design tool to collaborate with agents.

Paper brings our production codebase into an infinite canvas for our design process. We can ideate in the context of our production experience.

Nad Chishtie, Head of Design at Lovable

Thousands of teams now pay for Paper. We’ve ranked near the top of Ramp’s fastest-growing companies list for four consecutive months, including multiple months at #1. We are onboarding leading design teams, learning what they need, and building the best design tool for teams shipping with agents.

Paper plugs directly into Inspect, our own coding agent, and can pull and push right from production. Designers can spend more energy on the craft.

Diego Zaks, VP Design at Ramp

Paper is expanding beyond design teams too. Engineers, sales teams, and growth teams use Paper as a visual interface to their agents. Paper is a connected canvas for diagramming, building decks, and refining ideas.

The future of design

The future of design is agent-scale. Paper will become infrastructure for agents. Your CI pipeline will create canvases with visual diffs. Your custom harnesses will embed Paper. Design will be part of more workflows than ever before as agents and humans collaborate.

Paper bet on HTML and CSS as our rendering engine because they form a natural language for agents. In independent benchmarking, Paper’s agent flows are faster, more accurate, and use fewer tokens than agents in other design tools.

Today’s financing gives Paper the resources to build for agent-scale and the runway to do it with care and quality. We’re investing further in our editor, our agent infrastructure, and our world-class team. And we’ll continue to commit to open-source projects like Paper Shaders and Paper Mono.

Teams choosing Paper can trust that we’re here for the long term. We are focused on building the best place for teams and agents to design the next generation of iconic software.

Try Paper on the web or download Paper Desktop.

For the love of design,
Stephen

P.S. Join the mission

We started Paper from a love for design. We’re a company of builders: product-led, quality above everything.

Paper is a place where people can do their life’s work. We look to hire brilliant, curious, humble people who have extreme interests in design, UI, engineering, and the art of software.

We’re fully remote and currently hiring for:

  • Product Designer (principal-level)
  • Design Engineer (principal-level)
  • Product engineering, agents and editor (principal-level)
  • Business Ops, first hire

If you’d like to join our team, send some examples of your work to join@paper.design.

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