The round was co-led by Accel and ICONIQ, with participation from Designer Fund and a group of operators that includes Michael Grinich of WorkOS and Anton Osika of Lovable, alongside engineers and designers from Anthropic and OpenAI. Accel partner Dan Levine, who also backed Paper’s earlier 4.2 million dollar seed round, joined the investment. Paper did not disclose a post-money valuation or headcount.
Paper positions itself as a design tool for teams where humans and AI agents build software together. Its editor renders interfaces in HTML and CSS rather than a proprietary canvas format, which the company says lets designs connect directly to production code and to coding agents.
Customers and revenue growth
Paper reports 25 times growth in annual recurring revenue since the early-2026 launch of Paper Desktop, though it did not publish an absolute revenue figure. The customer list disclosed in the announcement includes Ramp, Vercel, PostHog, Lovable, Quartr and Y Combinator, a mix of developer-tool companies and fast-growing startups whose engineering teams already work closely with AI. Founder Stephen Haney framed the problem the product targets by noting that designers are being asked to move faster while still using tools built for an earlier workflow.
A design layer for agentic engineering
Paper enters a market long dominated by Figma, and does so by betting that the handoff between design and code is being compressed by AI coding agents. By rendering directly in web technologies, Paper aims to remove the translation step between a design file and a shipped interface. Accel’s Dan Levine described the company as built for a setting where people and AI create together, contrasting it with design software created before generative tools existed.
Analysis: what the round signals for founders
The opportunity here is timing. Paper attached itself to a concrete workflow shift, the rise of coding agents, and showed a single legible traction metric, 25 times ARR growth, that maps to that shift. For founders, the replicable lesson is that a sharp wedge into an incumbent category is easier to fund when the product rides a change the incumbent was not built for, and when early customers are themselves credible technology brands.
The risk is durability. A 25 times multiple on a small base is common in the first year after launch and says little about retention, gross margin or the defensibility of the wedge against Figma, which can add agent-friendly export. Founders copying this playbook should expect that a fast early curve invites a fast incumbent response, and should use the capital to convert launch momentum into switching costs before that response arrives.
More information
Source and more information: Paper Raises 34 Million Dollars Series A (Business Wire)
Supplementary source: Paper seed round announcement (paper.design)