Stephen Haney Paper is a founder story with an unusually winding path to a Series A funding round. Haney is the founder and CEO of Paper, a San Francisco design platform that renders every element in native HTML and CSS so designs export directly as production code, eliminating the traditional handoff between designers and engineers. In July 2026, Paper closed a $34 million Series A co-led by Accel and ICONIQ, bringing its total funding to $38.5 million.
Before any of that, Haney ran engineering for a digital agency, wrote self-published books on iOS game development, and built an open-source design system used by millions of developers. Here is how that path led to what investors are calling a serious challenger in a design software market Figma has dominated for years.
Who Is Stephen Haney?
Stephen Haney is the founder and CEO of Paper, based in Southern California, according to his own personal website and GitHub profile. He describes himself directly, in his own words, as “a founder, engineer, designer, and game developer,” a combination that maps closely onto the actual products he has built across his career.
That self-description isn’t just personal branding. Haney’s career has moved fluidly between consumer-facing creative work and serious enterprise engineering, a range that shows up directly in Paper’s own pitch: a design tool built by someone who has personally worked on both sides of the designer-engineer divide the product is trying to close.
From Game Development Books to Building Radix UI
Haney’s early career included running engineering for a Bay Area digital agency in 2014, producing websites for brands including Levi’s, Dockers, and Genentech, before becoming an engineering manager at Newell Brands (Newell Rubbermaid) in 2015, where he led front-end engineering efforts across roughly 300 brands after relocating to New York. Around the same period, he also wrote and self-published two books on iOS game development, “Game Development with Swift” and a follow-up “Swift 3 Game Development,” which he says on his own site have together sold thousands of copies with a rating above 4.5 stars on Amazon.
In 2018, Haney co-founded Modulz with the stated goal of bridging the gap between designers and developers. That effort produced Radix UI, an open-source, accessibility-focused React component library that Haney’s own site and independent tracking from Specter Monitor describe as reaching several million monthly npm downloads, alongside a companion styling library called Stitches.
The Modulz Acquisition and Leading Product at WorkOS
WorkOS acquired Modulz in 2022. Haney then joined WorkOS as head of product engineering, a role he held through 2024, where he says he scaled the company’s developer tools from early product-market fit into a high-growth phase and launched AuthKit, WorkOS’s authentication product, which he has personally described as “the world’s best login,” a characterization worth noting as Haney’s own marketing framing rather than an independently verified ranking.
That WorkOS tenure gave Haney direct, recent experience scaling developer-facing infrastructure at a fast-growing company, immediately before he left to found Paper in September 2024.
The Problem Paper Set Out to Solve
Design and engineering teams have long relied on a handoff process: a designer builds a mockup in a tool like Figma, then an engineer manually re-implements that design in code, a process that introduces delay, miscommunication, and drift between what was designed and what actually ships. As AI coding agents from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI increasingly write production code directly, that handoff friction becomes a bigger bottleneck, since a static image-based design file gives an AI agent nothing structured to work from.
Paper’s positioning, as reported across multiple outlets covering its funding round, is that the traditional design canvas model, where visual elements exist separately from the code that will eventually represent them, no longer fits a world where both human engineers and AI agents need to work directly with production-ready code from the earliest design stage.
Building Paper: HTML-Native Design and Agent Integration
Paper’s design canvas renders every element in native HTML, CSS, and React rather than a proprietary file format, meaning what a designer builds on the canvas is the same code that ships to production, rather than a separate artifact an engineer has to translate. The company has described integrating with AI coding agents through a shared protocol, letting designers and tools like Claude or GitHub Copilot collaborate on the same underlying canvas.
Accel partner Dan Levine has described Paper as defining a new category built for a world where humans and AI create together, rather than the human-only design workflows most existing tools were built around, according to the company’s funding announcement.
Inside Paper’s $34 Million Series A
Stephen Haney Paper announced a $34 million Series A on July 23, 2026, co-led by Accel and ICONIQ, following an earlier $4.2 million seed round led by Accel in February 2025, bringing total disclosed funding to $38.5 million. Haney framed the round around supporting designers directly. “Helping design teams keep up with agentic workflows is our north star,” he said in the funding announcement.
The company says it will use the new funding to accelerate editor development, build out agent infrastructure, and grow its team, including hiring principal-level product designers, design engineers, and product engineers, while remaining a fully remote company.
Growth and Traction: Rapid Revenue Growth and Notable Customers
Paper says its annualized recurring revenue grew 25 times within a month of its Desktop product launch, and that it has appeared on Ramp’s Fastest Growing Companies list for four consecutive months, according to citybiz and Startup Fortune’s independent reporting on the round. Both of those figures come from the company’s own disclosures rather than independently audited data, worth noting given how early-stage growth metrics are typically self-reported.
Named customers include Ramp, Lovable, Vercel, PostHog, Quartr, and Y Combinator, a customer list weighted heavily toward other fast-growing technology companies rather than traditional enterprise design teams, consistent with Paper’s positioning as a tool built specifically for teams already working closely with AI coding agents.
The Investors Backing Stephen Haney
Paper’s Series A investor list is notable for how many participants are themselves operators rather than pure financial investors: Michael Grinich, CEO of WorkOS, Haney’s former employer; Anton Osika, founder of Lovable; and individual engineers and designers from Anthropic and OpenAI. Returning investors from the seed round include Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, alongside Basecase and David Hoang.
ICONIQ partner Mariano Payano has described Paper as the first canvas built for where software is going, citing organic, word-of-mouth adoption among quality-focused engineering teams as a rare signal at this stage, according to the company’s own funding announcement.
Paper’s Position Against Figma and the Design Tool Race
Paper enters a design software market long dominated by Figma, and its funding round drew specific attention because of its timing: Startup Fortune’s own analysis of the round noted that Figma’s stock had fallen sharply in 2026, and framed Paper’s HTML-native approach as directly addressing the same AI-driven shift in software design that has pressured Figma’s business. That comparison reflects Startup Fortune’s own editorial framing rather than a claim made by Paper itself, and should be read as one outlet’s competitive analysis rather than an established consensus.
Figma has responded to the same industry shift with its own AI-to-code feature, Figma Make, and continues to process a large volume of design files with deep enterprise relationships, meaning Paper’s near-term opportunity likely lies in winning teams building new, AI-native workflows from scratch rather than displacing Figma’s existing enterprise customer base outright.
What’s Next for Paper
With fresh Series A capital, Paper’s near-term priorities center on accelerating its editor development, expanding its agent infrastructure, and growing its team with senior product design and engineering hires. The company’s fully remote structure and product-led growth approach suggest a deliberate choice to scale efficiently rather than build a large go-to-market organization early.
Haney’s own framing, helping designers do deep, meaningful work at a pace that supports their businesses in the agentic era, suggests Paper’s ambitions extend toward becoming default infrastructure for design teams working alongside AI agents, rather than a narrower point tool.
Lessons for Entrepreneurs From Stephen Haney’s Journey
Haney’s path offers a few clear lessons for founders with varied, seemingly unrelated career experience. First, his self-published game development books and early agency work gave him hands-on exposure to both creative and technical disciplines years before Paper existed, a combination that shaped the exact designer-engineer bridge Paper is now built around. Second, his experience scaling WorkOS’s product engineering team from early product-market fit into high growth gave him direct, recent operational experience relevant to running his own venture-backed company.
Third, recruiting investors who are also operators, WorkOS’s CEO, Lovable’s founder, and Vercel’s CEO among them, gave Paper a level of hands-on product feedback that pure financial investors typically cannot provide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Stephen Haney? Stephen Haney is the founder and CEO of Paper, a design platform for AI-native software development. He previously co-founded Modulz, creator of the open-source Radix UI component library, and later led product engineering at WorkOS after it acquired Modulz in 2022.
What does Paper do? Paper is a design platform that renders every design element in native HTML, CSS, and React, so what a designer builds exports directly as production code, integrating with AI coding agents rather than requiring a separate design-to-code handoff.
How much funding has Paper raised? Paper has raised $38.5 million total: a $4.2 million seed round led by Accel in February 2025, and a $34 million Series A co-led by Accel and ICONIQ, announced July 23, 2026.
Who invested in Paper’s Series A? Paper’s Series A was co-led by Accel and ICONIQ, with participation from Designer Fund, WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich, Lovable founder Anton Osika, and individual engineers and designers from Anthropic and OpenAI, alongside returning seed investors including Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch.
What did Stephen Haney do before Paper? Before Paper, Haney co-founded Modulz in 2018, creating the Radix UI component library, then led product engineering at WorkOS from 2022 to 2024 after WorkOS acquired Modulz. Earlier in his career, he worked in engineering roles at a digital agency and at Newell Brands.
How is Paper different from Figma? Unlike Figma’s proprietary design file format, Paper renders designs in native HTML, CSS, and React from the start, so designs export directly as shippable code without a separate translation step for engineers or AI coding agents.
Conclusion
Stephen Haney Paper represents a founder betting that a career spent moving between game development, agency work, enterprise engineering, and open-source design tooling was actually building toward one specific insight: that AI-native software design needs a fundamentally different foundation than the proprietary canvas tools built for a human-only workflow. With $38.5 million in total funding, notable operator-investors from WorkOS, Lovable, and Vercel, and a customer list weighted toward fast-growing AI-native companies, Paper is testing whether that foundation can meaningfully compete against an incumbent as entrenched as Figma.
For more founder stories in developer tools and AI-native software, see Mahesh Sathiamoorthy’s Bespoke Labs and Jen Phan’s Passionfroot on Denote Press.
