Anima Wants to Close the Gap Between Figma and Shipped Code. That Gap Is a Black Hole.

The Macro: The Design-to-Code Problem Is Old. The Graveyard of Failed Solutions Is Older.

Every design handoff I’ve ever watched has ended the same way: a Figma file, a defeated engineer, and a UI that looks vaguely like what the designer intended. The gap between “pixel-perfect mockup” and “actual running code” is one of those problems the industry has been confidently solving for about fifteen years without fully solving it.

And yet the money flowing into this category right now is real. Multiple market research outfits (Future Market Insights, The Business Research Company) peg the AI-powered design tools market somewhere in the $6 to $8 billion range for 2025, with serious CAGR projections through the decade. The specific numbers vary depending on who you ask, but the directional story is consistent: this is a market that’s growing fast and attracting capital.

What’s interesting about the current crop of competitors is how differently they’ve carved up the problem. Locofy and Anima (the product we’re talking about today) sit at the Figma-to-code end of the spectrum. Builder.io is coming from the CMS side and moving toward design systems. Webflow is trying to be the whole thing: design surface, CMS, hosting, the works. Google Stitch is doing fast UI exploration but reportedly stumbles on production-grade output.

The honest answer is that none of them have fully cracked it. Generating code that looks right in a demo is easy. Generating code that fits into an existing design system, respects component libraries, handles edge cases, and doesn’t make the senior engineer on the team wince is a completely different problem.

That’s the problem Anima is swinging at. I find myself actually curious whether they’ve gotten closer than the others, because the “vibe coding” energy spreading across the dev tools space has raised the floor on what AI code generation can do, even if the ceiling is still murky.

The Micro: A UX Agent That Says It Actually Knows Your Design System

Anima’s pitch is specific, which I respect. They’re not claiming to generate any code for any purpose. They’re saying: give us your Figma files and your design system, and we’ll generate accurate, responsive frontend code that matches your brand. The tagline is “UX Design Agent | Design to Code” and they’re explicit that they’re targeting people who are tired of generic code agents producing generic output.

The product workflow, as described, runs from rough ideas through Figma and out the other side as frontend code. The AI is positioned as a design agent, not just a converter. That framing matters because it implies some degree of reasoning about layout, component hierarchy, and responsive behavior, not just a dumb translation layer that reads Figma layers and outputs div soup.

The design-system-aware angle is where I’d focus if I were evaluating this seriously. Most code generation tools produce output that looks fine in isolation and breaks immediately when you try to plug it into an existing codebase with an established component library. If Anima has genuinely trained or fine-tuned on the logic of how design systems work (tokens, component variants, spacing scales, the whole thing), that’s a real differentiator.

It picked up solid traction when it launched on Product Hunt, landing around the top three for the day, which at minimum means the pitch is landing with the right audience.

According to LinkedIn and Crunchbase, the company has a YC background (S18) and co-founders Avishay Cohen and, separately listed on Crunchbase, Shun Pang and Rachel Mumford. The YC pedigree means they’ve been around long enough to have iterated on this problem before the current AI wave made it fashionable.

The thing I keep coming back to: the vibe coding trend that’s reshaping how developers think about generation tools has created real appetite for this kind of product. Designers want agency. Engineers want fewer tedious translation tasks. Anima is threading a needle between both groups.

The Verdict

I’m cautiously interested, which is more than I can say for most tools in this category right now.

The specific framing around design systems is the right bet. Generic code generation is a commodity at this point. Any team that’s actually used a modern LLM to write UI code knows that the output is fine until it isn’t, and it usually isn’t fine the moment you need it to fit an actual product. If Anima delivers on the design-system-aware promise with enough fidelity to be useful in a real codebase, they have a genuine wedge.

What I’d want to see at 30 days is real case studies. Not demo videos with clean, isolated components. Messy real-world Figma files from teams with opinionated design systems, run through the tool, with honest output shown. At 60 days, I’d want to know retention. Do teams actually keep using it after the initial novelty, or does it become a thing people tried once?

The crowded field is a real concern. Locofy, Builder.io, and others are not standing still.

But the YC lineage and the specificity of the pitch suggest this isn’t a team that just read about AI design tools last month. They’ve been in this problem long enough to know where the bodies are buried. That’s worth something.