Paper (https://paper.design), a San Francisco-based provider of a design platform for agentic AI, has raised $34 million in Series A funding led by Accel and ICONIQ. The platform connects designers, teams, and AI coding agents on a single canvas built on native HTML and CSS standards, allowing designs to export directly as usable code. The capital will accelerate product development, expand the team, and deepen AI-native workflows.
Agentic Era Reshapes Design Tools
The timing aligns with surging investment in AI agents and no-code platforms. Lovable raised $330M Series B in December 2025 at a $6.6B valuation. Penpot secured $8M in 2022. Paper's approach addresses the gap between traditional design tools and agent-driven workflows by rendering on web standards rather than proprietary formats.
Proprietary Formats Create Translation Friction
Existing design tools often lock work in proprietary files that require manual translation to code. This disconnect grows costly as teams integrate AI coding agents. Paper's canvas runs on HTML and CSS, enabling bidirectional flows where agents read and write directly to designs without loss. Independent benchmarking by Braintrust showed Paper's agent flows run faster, more accurately, and with fewer tokens than agents in other tools.
Code-Native Canvas Enables Agent Collaboration
Paper Desktop and the MCP server let agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot collaborate in real time on the canvas. Designs pull live data from repositories and export as production-ready code. This differs from competitors that generate static outputs or operate inside code editors without a rich visual surface. Customers including Ramp, Lovable, Vercel, and PostHog already use it in production.
"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." — Dan Levine, Partner at Accel
Accel and ICONIQ Signal Sector Conviction
The round brings total funding to $38.5 million. Accel and ICONIQ co-led, with participation from Designer Fund and angels including Guillermo Rauch of Vercel and Michael Grinich of WorkOS. The investors' focus on scalable AI infrastructure validates Paper's positioning at the intersection of design and agentic development.
AI Design Market Expands Rapidly
The AI-powered design tools market stands at $8.22 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $18.16 billion by 2030 at a 21.9% CAGR, per Research & Markets. Generative AI in design is expected to grow from $1.11 billion to $4.54 billion by 2030 at 32.5% CAGR, according to TBRC. Broader no-code platforms are forecast to expand from $14.06 billion in 2023 to $50.03 billion by 2032 at 15.5% CAGR, per Grand View Research. Structural drivers include agent proliferation and demand for seamless design-to-code handoffs.
Remote Team Scales With Strong Traction
Paper operates fully remote with 19 employees and has achieved notable growth signals. ARR increased 25x in a single month following the Paper Desktop launch. The company ranked at or near the top of Ramp's fastest-growing companies list for four consecutive months.