Companies including Ramp, Lovable, and Vercel have adopted Paper
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Paper, the design platform for the agentic era, today announced its $34 million Series A with Accel and ICONIQ. Investors participating include Designer Fund, Michael Grinich (WorkOS), Anton Osika (Lovable), and engineers and designers from Anthropic and OpenAI. Paper will use the new funding to accelerate product development, expand its team, and deepen its investment in AI-native workflows for designers.
AI is changing how software gets built in the vibe coding era, yet creative work remains essential and design workflows have largely been unchanged. Paper is building a new foundation for design that enables designers and engineers to collaborate through a shared language, while incorporating AI and agents directly into the creative process.
"We want to help designers and creatives do deep, meaningful work, at a pace that supports their businesses in the agentic era. Helping design teams keep up with agentic workflows is our north star at Paper," said Stephen Haney, Founder and CEO of Paper. "Designers are being asked to move faster than ever, yet they're still working with tools built for a different time. We believe there is a massive opportunity for a new generation of tools that help designers do their best work while working seamlessly with modern AI engineering workflows with coding agents like Claude Code and Codex."
Unlike traditional design tools built around proprietary canvases, Paper renders with HTML and CSS, enabling designs to connect directly with production code and the agents increasingly responsible for creating it. The result is a platform that brings design and engineering closer together, reducing handoff friction and helping teams move from idea to production faster.
"Paper is defining a new category with a fundamentally new approach to design software," said Dan Levine, Partner, Accel. "Most design tools were built for a world where humans did all the work. Paper is built for a world where humans and AI create together, and is already seeing strong adoption among some of the world's most influential technology companies.”
"The line between design and engineering is blurring, elevating the importance of taste. We believe Paper is the first canvas built for where software is going, and some of the most quality-obsessed teams we know are pulling it in from all directions. That kind of organic word of mouth is rare." said Mariano Payano, Partner, ICONIQ.
The company has rapidly accelerated since the early 2026 launch of Paper Desktop, which turns the design canvas into a shared workspace for humans and AI agents, bridging design, code, and data in real time. Paper has grown ARR 25x since launch and has appeared on Ramp's Fastest Growing Companies list for four consecutive months. Paper is already used by many of the companies defining the next generation of software, including Ramp, Lovable, Vercel, PostHog, Quartr and Y Combinator.
"AI changes everything, including design tools," said Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel. "Paper was born at the perfect time to leverage intelligence on demand, which creative people can influence and channel to design the next big thing."
"A lot has changed since the last wave of design tools," said Adam Wathan, creator of Tailwind CSS. "The Paper team is proving you can build something better in 2026 by starting from first principles and challenging all of the old assumptions."
ABOUT PAPER
Paper is the design platform for the agentic era. Founded by Stephen Haney, Paper is built for teams shipping software with AI and coding agents, Paper combines a professional-grade design environment with agent-native workflows, enabling designers and engineers to collaborate through a shared language. Leading software companies including Ramp, Lovable, Vercel, PostHog, Quartr, and Y Combinator use Paper to design, iterate and ship products faster.
Contacts
PRESS CONTACT
Jill Harding
COMMAND for Paper
jill@heycommand.com
