Paper raises $34M Series A from Accel, ICONIQ for AI-native design platform
Paper, a design platform built for human-AI collaboration, raised $34 million in Series A led by Accel and ICONIQ. Investors include Designer Fund, WorkOS co-founder Michael Grinich, Lovable co-founder Anton Osika, and engineers from Anthropic and OpenAI. Founded by Stephen Haney (ex-WorkOS), Paper renders design in HTML and CSS, enabling direct connection between design canvas and production code while supporting Claude Code, Codex, and other AI agents.
The company has grown ARR 25x since launch in early 2026 and appeared on Ramp's Fastest Growing Companies list for four consecutive months. Customers include Ramp, Lovable, Vercel, PostHog, Quartr, and Y Combinator. Paper's core product is a shared workspace where designers and engineers collaborate through a unified language—bridging design systems, code, and agents in real-time, reducing handoff friction from design to production.
For architects: this signals a market shift where design tools must support agentic workflows, not just human UI design. Traditional design platforms (Figma, Adobe) were built for direct human manipulation; Paper starts from the assumption that agents will generate design variations, review layouts, and suggest code implementations. As code generation matures, design infrastructure becomes a choke point for speed—making Paper's position at the design-engineering boundary strategically valuable. The team composition (Anthropic, OpenAI engineers) suggests deep product alignment with the agentic stack.