A Match Made in Heaven

Why Figma is acquiring Weavy, an 11-month-old AI design tool

Almost a year ago a friend and former Designer Fund founder sent me this email -

Ben — hope you’re stellar.

Lior, a guy used to work with at Fiverr has started a company that helps designers build AI workflows for their teams. They already have teams at NVIDIA and others using the tool.

Teaser deck here

Shout if you want the intro. I will likely invest myself.

Now, we see a lot of creative tools and my initial gut read was -

1. Oh man, not another AI design tool

2. 4 founders?!

3. Is Fiverr a great launchpad for a design tool?

However, this having come from a designer founder/friend I trust I decided to at least keep an open mind and see what they’d built.

And once I did that, my outlook changed completely (by the way, this is why we put such an emphasis on products/prototyping)

Weavy approached AI-powered visual design using a node-based UI, historically reserved for the most professional creative tools like Origami for UI or Nuke for visual effects. However I found their approach much more accessible than those tools while still being powerful and flexible. Here is my write-up of the product in the original investment memo -

Their product approach has 3 key features that make for a very powerful tool -

1. It is model agnostic / flexible - this means they actually allow you to use any model as it is released and even more so different models for different parts of the workflow. E.g. use a model that’s great for text layout and another that’s better for photography for a different part of a composition or design.

2. It exposes process - this is a big deal and why I find Weavy so compelling. By exposing the process it lets you know how people are doing the work they do and easily lets you modify it for your own needs. This makes the tool more usable for a wider range of designers/animators/creatives and makes community more powerful as a shared file is way more usable.

3. It works as an aggregator - one thing I heard from the early users is how much they were bouncing between various tools to do their work. This brings all the workflows into one space - and more importantly into one subscription.

Also worth noting that of the four founders, two have design/creative backgrounds: Jonathan Gur-Zeev used to work as an animator and Itay Schiff was also a VFX artist, creative director, and ran a motion graphics studio. Weavy is as “designer-founded” as they come.

So we wrote the check and got to work, supporting them in all things product, design, and GTM, especially given the product is geared at designers..

Over the last 11 months, the Weavy team blew me away on so many levels:

They shipped extremely quickly.

They engaged their community and elevated anyone that was doing interesting work on the platform.

They took feedback well and used data to understand their shortcomings

They worked their butts off (my WhatsApp thread with Lior has messages early in the morning, late at night, and everything in between)

But most importantly, they built a product that people love and that solves a real pain point: letting people do high quality design work with the speed and scale they never could have imagined.

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It is not surprising then that Figma + Weavy is a match made in heaven.

Dylan and the Figma team have built an extraordinary creative tools company that is loved by millions of people. Their mission of making design accessible to everyone is perfectly aligned with Weavy’s ethos and they have incredible resources to help Weavy scale and maintain a high product bar.

We couldn’t have imagined a better partner.

While I’m bummed that we won’t be working together as closely anymore I’m excited for what the future brings for the Weavy team and can’t wait to see how the product evolves over the coming years.

Congrats to Lior, Jonathan G., Jonathan A., Itay and the rest of the Weavy team.

We wish you nothing but success in the next phase of your journey!