Noon emerges from stealth with $44 million for AI design tool

Startup backed by First Round Capital and executives from Stripe, OpenAI and Apple develops AI-driven design tool integrating code and workflows

Noon, an AI-native product design tool, said it has raised $44 million in funding as it emerges from stealth, the largest stealth funding round for a design-technology startup to date. The round includes backing from Chemistry, First Round Capital, Scribble Ventures, Elevation Capital, and Afore Capital, alongside heads of design and senior leaders from Stripe, OpenAI, Microsoft AI, Apple, Meta, Perplexity, and Shopify.

 

The company is founded by Aditya Bandi and Kushagra Sinha, both second-time founders with prior successful exits. Bandi's previous company was acquired by Yahoo, and Sinha's by Whatfix, a SoftBank-backed unicorn. Headquartered in the US with a presence in Bengaluru, the team is composed of engineers and operators from Google, Ramp, Vercel, Slack, Uber, PhonePe, Grab, Groww, and Replit.

 

 

"For decades, product design has borrowed the tools of graphic design. Static, visual, flat. But products aren't posters," said Aditya Bandi, co-CEO of Noon. "They move, respond, and evolve. We built Noon because we believe the thing you design should be the thing that ships. On our canvas, every screen, every component is real code from your own codebase. For the first time, designers and engineers are working in the same artefact, not passing pictures back and forth."

 

The problem Noon is solving is one the industry has lived with for years. Today's design tools are descendants of graphic design software, built for static, visual output. But digital products aren't static. They respond to input, hold state, and transition between screens. Designers pour hours into crafting flows and screens that are, at their core, illustrations of software, not software itself. Engineers then reinterpret those illustrations, and something is always lost. As AI rapidly changes how software gets built, there's a growing risk that design becomes an afterthought, automated, generic, and stripped of the craft that makes great products feel great.

 

“Designers carry something irreplaceable — taste, craft, the instinct for when something feels right versus when it just works right. We built Noon to make sure those qualities don't get lost in the age of AI,” said Kushagra Sinha, co-CEO of Noon. “This funding lets us bring it to every team that needs it. It lets designers move at the speed the world now demands without giving up the thing that makes great products great,” said Sinha.

 

Noon is built to close that gap. The tool pairs a familiar, canvas-based design experience with code drawn directly from a team's existing codebase and design system. What goes on the canvas isn't a picture of a product. It is the product. AI is woven into the experience, accelerating the repetitive parts of design work while keeping designers in full creative control.

 

The round also drew participation from an unusual breadth of individual investors. Among them are Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe; Ian Silber, Head of Product Design at OpenAI; Soleio Cuervo, second designer at Facebook and former Head of Design at Dropbox; Mike Davidson, CVP of Design and User Research at Microsoft AI; and Julie Zhuo, Founder of Sundial and former VP of Design at Meta.

 

“What Aditya, Kushagra and team are building isn’t just a better design tool, it’s a fundamental shift in how products get made. When what you design is the same thing that ships, speed, quality, and creativity all compound. We believe this is the future of product development,” said Mark Goldberg, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Chemistry.

 

Noon will open access to design teams in the coming weeks. The aspiration, as the founders put it, is simple: speed and craft, together, without compromise.