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Designers are one of the most opinionated communities in software. They notice the kerning on your error states. They have feelings about your icon weights. They will switch tools over a snap-to-pixel quirk. Taste is the entire job.
That same community has spent the last year watching the loop between design and code collapse. What used to take weeks now takes hours. In our view, it is one of the most exciting shifts in how software gets built that has happened over the last decade, and it is exposing an awkward truth: many of the tools designers use were built for a workflow that no longer makes sense.
That is why we are honored to be co-leading Paper's Series A, partnering with Stephen Haney and the team as they build the design canvas for the agentic era.
The bet underneath Paper is simple: design is not going away. Coding agents are extraordinary, but human taste, judgment, and craft remain central to building products people love. What needs to change is the surface where that work happens. Today's design tools were built for moving pixels in proprietary file formats. They were not built for collaborating with an agent that thinks in code.
As Stephen puts it, "We want to help designers and creatives do deep, meaningful work, at a pace that supports their businesses in the agentic era."
Paper rebuilds the canvas on the primitives of the modern web. Every object is real HTML, CSS, and React. There is no proprietary format to translate, and what you design is the code that ships. Agents read and edit Paper directly rather than through brittle interpretation layers. Designers can pull components from a production codebase, adjust them visually, and push changes back without losing fidelity. The product is built unapologetically for serious designers, and it is agent-agnostic by design, letting users bring whichever coding agent they prefer.
The bet is that the canvas itself becomes one of the most important layers in modern software development: the surface where humans direct agents and review what comes back.
We believe the timing is hard to overstate. Coding agents went from novelty to daily workflow in less than a year, and UI is being generated faster than designers can review it. Design tools rarely change, but when they do, the shift is often quick, led by a small group of opinionated tastemakers who pull the rest of the community along.
Paper Desktop launched in late February, turning the design canvas into a shared workspace where humans and agents work across design, code, and data in real time. Since then, the product has spread organically through the design and AI-native developer communities. Designers and engineers at companies like Ramp, Lovable, Vercel, Posthog, and Quartr are actively using and championing the product. Designers who have spent years in the same tool do not switch casually. They are switching to Paper, and they are sharing their experiences with others.
Our conviction starts with Stephen. He has spent the better part of a decade on this exact problem. He was the co-founder and CTO of Modulz, acquired by WorkOS in 2022, and the creator of Radix UI, one of the most widely used component libraries in the React ecosystem. We believe that history gives him something rare: deep technical credibility with developers, deep product credibility with designers, and a clear point of view on how the two converge. People we know and respect have consistently described him as thoughtful, humble, technically excellent, and a magnet for tastemakers.
The line between designing software and shipping it is collapsing in real time. Paper is the canvas where humans and agents stand on the same side of that line, working and building together.
We could not be more excited to welcome the Paper team to the ICONIQ Community.
Published:
July 23, 2026
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