Supernova wants to make it easy to move design elements to code bases

As companies increasingly turn to tools like Figma to design their software, moving the design elements like color schemes from the design tool to your code base can be a time-consuming and manual process.

Supernova is an early-stage startup that wants to make it easier by acting as a bridge between your design team and your development team, making it easy to change design pieces in an automated way.

Today the Y Combinator graduates announced a $4.8 million seed round.

“The idea for Supernova comes from the discrepancy between designers and developers. There is, I think, sort of a communication block between them. Also, the design and developer worlds are quite disconnected from each other, and so any kind of thing that you can do to help designers and developers work better together actually goes a long way, and that’s especially true in larger organizations,” company CEO and co-founder Jiri Trecak told TechCrunch.

The software acts as a bridge of sorts, connecting your different tools and design repositories with your coding tools to facilitate the connection between all of these tools at scale. What’s more, if you have a particularly complex workflow, you can build custom apps or scripts on top of Supernova to extend the tooling even further, Trecak explained.

He says an easy way to understand how this works is to imagine you have a brand like Spotify and you need to change the color of your logo from the familiar green to a new color. An undertaking like this would take months to do manually, but with Supernova, you just change your color scheme in your design tooling and run the scripts, and it will cascade across the entire code base, changing the colors automatically.

He said it can work across multiple design tools and Supernova will still move the changes regardless.

He started the company in the Czech Republic in 2018 and became the first startup from that country to be accepted into Y Combinator in the winter of 2019. Today, Trecak runs the company out of San Francisco, and the company launched the current iteration of the product last year. The engineering team remains in the Czech Republic.

They have built up a user base of over 1,000 customers, several dozen of whom are large enterprise users. The company currently has about 30 people, with plans to increase that number with the new funding.

As he grows the company, Trecak says that he is very much focused on building a diverse employee base and currently has employees who represent eight or nine different nationalities. “This is something that is very much our focus. We have been trying to be quite diligent about this and we will try to be even more so as we go to the U.S. market,” he said.

Today’s funding was led by Wing Venture Capital with participation from EQT Ventures and Kaya VC, along with several prominent industry angels.