Top Design Tools Startups 2023

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.

Popsy is a website builder with a Notion-like editor. It lets you create professional websites as easy as writing a doc.

Our sidekick guides buyers on your site with AI nudges+chat to drive conversion.

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.

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.

Zaymo is a tool that increases email conversion rates by turning emails into mini-websites where consumers complete tasks in the inbox. Ecommerce marketers embed shopping widgets, review forms, polls, and other engaging calls to action in the email.

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.

Ion automatically converts Figma designs into clean react code to speed up front-end engineers. We use AI to understand your codebase and generate code within the context of your design systems and styling libraries. We also incorporate your existing components to your generations to ensure high code quality.

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

Easily create and publish 3D web experiences. Build and iterate fast with production-ready results.

Tempo empowers anyone to generate and edit high-quality react code using natural language prompts and a visual code editor. This helps developers stay focused on writing business logic rather than CSS, helps designers ship pixel-perfect UIs without engineering, and helps teams move 10X faster by eliminating the design->code translation process.

Noya is a new kind of product design tool for non-designers. This is our second time co-founding a design tools company – our first company was acquired by Airbnb in 2017 and we became the design tools team there. At Airbnb, we built the design infrastructure that the entire company relied on to scale design without increasing headcount costs. We did this by letting non-designers (such as marketing, PMs, and engineering) design screens and websites. Now we're making these tools available to every company.

Iliad is a creative tool for generating concept art, 2D, and 3D game assets using AI. It lets designers step through and edit the evolution of assets they’re generating so they have fine control over the final output. We call this new AI-assisted creative technique “mid-generation editing”.

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”.

Typedream is a website, blog, and form builder with a familiar text-editing interface and beautiful built-in defaults that makes building pages really fast and easy

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

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

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.

Dream3D is an AI-powered 3D design tool that makes it easy to create studio-quality computer graphics.

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.

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.

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

We build software to allow anyone, anywhere to create in 3D together. We believe that collaborating in 3D should feel magical and we're working to make it happen.

Versive, an AI-first survey platform that helps companies gather better user insights, faster. Our conversational surveys dynamically adapt to user responses, diving deeper with intelligent follow-up questions. Plus, our platform automatically categorizes and analyzes responses, enabling you to act on insights much faster. For product and design teams, this means conducting user research way faster. For marketing and customer teams, you'll uncover richer insights from every survey response.

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.

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

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.

Milk Video is a video marketing platform that simplifies short-form video creation for marketers. Anyone can collect, clip, and ship video content such as customer testimonials, employee testimonials, and thought pieces in minutes.

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.

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

Replo helps companies build websites with less code. Our goal is to create a single platform for businesses to design, develop, and market content on the internet.

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.

Repaint is a website building tool made for designers. You click and drag elements on a canvas, and then deploy your creation with one click. Our goal is to make a tool that allows people to create fully-featured web apps without coding.

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 600k users in more than 200 countries and regions around the world. We’re a remote first team, with a headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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!

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.

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.

Backlot is the Collaborative Design tool for the film and video ad industries. Figma for filmmakers. Backlot enables video creators to simulate their entire film in 3D, easily, accurately and collaboratively before stepping into the high risk pressure cooker that is production.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.