Our Investment in Paper: The AI-Native Design Space

More software is being created than ever before, unlocking growth in adjacent areas. The infrastructure that runs software is becoming more valuable, and at this new scale, even small improvements can mark a huge shift. At the same time, the bar for those improvements—for truly great design—continues to rise. To meet, and ideally exceed, that bar, designers need new, state-of-the-art solutions that match the new, state-of-the-art way we build software today.

Paper is the AI-native design tool built for this new era of software, enabling users to create beautiful designs with far less friction. It plugs seamlessly into agentic coding tools and is built on the same web standards that modern agents use. It’s also built from the ground up to work the way users want. Users can engage with Paper in its native canvas or via their preferred terminal or terminal emulator. When I design in Paper, I like to run Paper Desktop on one half of my monitor and Claude on the other. It becomes a real-time visual layer, allowing me to reprompt the agent or tweak the design myself.

It feels so functional that it’s almost obvious. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to build. Fortunately, Paper has the right team to do it. The founder, Stephen Haney, previously co-founded Modulz, an ahead-of-its-time web-native design tool. He also created Radix UI, an open-source component library that underpins Shadcn.

Now, the most forward-looking design teams are already using Paper every day—including at Vercel, Ramp, and Lovable—and the user base is only expanding, with Ramp spend data consistently showing Paper to be one of the fastest-growing startups. After leading their seed round last year, we’re pleased to continue our partnership with Paper by leading their Series A. We look forward to seeing what this team does next.