Anima (software)
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Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
Sources
22 citations
Review status
Source-backed
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v1 · 1,989 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Anima (stylized as AnimaApp and operating at animaapp.com) is an Israeli design-to-code platform that converts user-interface designs into developer-ready frontend code. Founded in 2017 by Avishay Cohen, Michal Cohen, and Or Arbel, the company launched its design-to-code product through the Y Combinator Summer 2018 batch and is headquartered in Tel Aviv with a presence in New York. Its core offering is a plugin for Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD that exports designs into responsive HTML and CSS, React, and Vue code, while recognizing repeated elements and reusing components to reduce duplication. Since 2024 Anima has pivoted toward generative AI, shipping an AI front-end coding assistant called Frontier, a browser-based "Anima Playground," and an API and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration that let AI coding agents generate, publish, and iterate on UI code. In February 2026 the company announced a strategic investment from IBM to expand enterprise adoption.
Anima should not be confused with several unrelated products that share the name, including AI-companion and "AI girlfriend" apps and the UK healthcare-software company Anima (a separate firm founded in 2021 that raised a $12 million Series A led by Molten Ventures in 2024). This article concerns only the design-to-code tool at animaapp.com.
The three founders met in Israel before starting the company. Avishay Cohen and Or Arbel first worked together at Mobli, a social-media and computer-vision startup, where Arbel led mobile development. Arbel went on to create Yo, a minimalist one-word messaging app that briefly became a viral sensation in 2014 and raised about $3 million, with Arbel relocating to the Bay Area and later New York to build it. Avishay Cohen and Michal Cohen met Arbel at Ben-Gurion University after completing their military service. After Yo faded, the trio reunited to build Anima, founding the company in 2017.
Anima's first products were plugins for the Sketch design tool. These included an Auto-Layout plugin for building responsive designs and "Launchpad," which exported Sketch designs to HTML. On July 2, 2018, the company unveiled "Timeline," a feature that let interactive designs made in Sketch be exported directly into functioning code. By that point Anima had bootstrapped to roughly 100,000 users with several thousand paying customers and was already profitable, and individual designers at Apple, Google, and Facebook were using it. The startup was admitted to Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, which it has described as the moment its design-to-code platform was "born."
Anima bootstrapped for its first several years and reached profitability by the end of 2019 before raising outside capital. Its disclosed financing history is summarized below.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investor | Other investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | September 2020 | $2.5 million | Hetz Ventures | Zohar Gilon (angel) |
| Series A | September 1, 2021 | $10 million | MizMaa Ventures | INcapital, Hetz Ventures |
| Strategic | February 5, 2026 | Undisclosed | IBM | -- |
The $2.5 million seed round was led by Tel Aviv-based Hetz Ventures with participation from Israeli angel investor Zohar Gilon. At the time Anima reported more than 300,000 designers and developers using the product and named Google, IBM, Verizon, Salesforce, BlueJeans, and Starbucks among its customers.
The $10 million Series A, announced on September 1, 2021, was led by MizMaa Ventures with participation from INcapital and Hetz Ventures. Anima said it had around 500,000 to 600,000 registered users at the time, with roughly 30,000 designers and developers onboarding monthly, and that its monthly active user base had grown from about 10,000 a year earlier to around 80,000. The company reported a free-to-paid conversion rate above 5% and said its team had grown from 4 to 30 employees over the prior year. Hetz Ventures partner Pavel Livshiz cited a roughly 300% increase in developer engagement, a tripled customer base, and quadrupled revenue over the preceding period. (A separately reported $12 million Series A led by Molten Ventures in March 2024 belongs to the unrelated healthcare company of the same name, not to AnimaApp.)
On February 5, 2026, Anima announced a strategic investment from IBM, made through IBM's venture arm, to accelerate enterprise adoption of what the companies described as "vibe coding." The investment amount was not disclosed. Emily Fontaine, IBM's global head of venture capital, said Anima's adoption was "driven from a technology platform that has resonated with enterprise product and design teams." Anima CEO Avishay Cohen framed the moment with the claim that "three billion people will soon code" and that "code is the new canvas." At the time of the IBM announcement, Anima reported more than 1.5 million installs and named Amazon, Samsung, Apple, Disney, Deloitte, and Accenture among the organizations using its platform.
Anima's foundational product is a plugin for design tools, most prominently Figma, that converts a selected design or frame into frontend code. It supports output as responsive HTML with CSS, SCSS, Tailwind CSS, or Styled Components, and as component code for React and Vue, with options for TypeScript, Next.js, Material UI, Ant Design, and shadcn/ui. The plugin also works with Sketch and Adobe XD. A central selling point is code quality: Anima automatically detects repeating elements and converts them into reusable components to minimize duplication, and its Auto-Flexbox layout produces relative positioning intended to handle dynamic content rather than pixel-perfect absolute positioning.
Anima integrates with Figma's Dev Mode and has positioned itself as Figma's largest design-to-code partner and a launch partner for Dev Mode, citing more than 1.4 million installs in 2025 and over 1.5 million by early 2026. Output can be handed off as a shareable Playground link, a full downloadable code package with assets, or an individual code snippet.
In May 2024 Anima launched Frontier, which it markets as the first AI coding assistant built specifically for front-end development. Distributed as a Visual Studio Code extension, Frontier analyzes a developer's existing codebase and maps the project's design system, frameworks, conventions, and components. According to Anima, this indexing happens locally inside VS Code using machine learning models, so source code is not uploaded to the cloud, a property aimed at enterprise security requirements. A developer can then select any part of a Figma design from within VS Code and generate React code that reuses the project's own components and matches its conventions, with support for open-source design systems such as Material UI, Ant Design, and shadcn. Frontier automatically generates and injects the resulting components and assets into the source tree rather than requiring manual copy-and-paste.
On March 13, 2025, Anima introduced Anima Playground, a browser-based environment for "UI-first" AI code generation. A user can paste a Figma link, type a prompt, or supply an image and have Anima generate a working application with high-quality UI code, for example using shadcn/ui with Tailwind. The Playground supports conversational iteration, an approach the company aligns with vibe coding, along with one-click publishing of responsive prototypes, full code ownership with GitHub integration, and in-browser preview powered by WebContainers technology from StackBlitz's Bolt.
Alongside the Playground, Anima announced the Anima API, which exposes its UI code-generation capability to AI coding agents and large language model-based tools. The company argues that general-purpose LLMs are strong at application logic but fall short at producing consistent, on-brand user-interface code, and that its API closes that gap. Bolt.new was named as a launch partner integrating the API into its AI coding agent. The API was offered for testing at dev.animaapp.com with general availability targeted for the second quarter of 2025.
On February 20, 2026, Anima released what it calls a UX design agent and an "Anima Skill" that lets external AI agents design, explore, and publish applications through Anima. The integration is built on the Model Context Protocol and is compatible with agents including Claude Code and ChatGPT, plus other MCP-capable coding agents and headless agent pipelines. Through the MCP tools, an agent can create an app from a natural-language prompt, from a URL whose visual language it captures, or from a Figma file, and Anima returns structured, readable frontend code that uses design tokens and UI-library-aligned components consistent with a team's brand and design system. A distinctive capability is parallel exploration: an agent can generate multiple interpretations of the same product idea, publish each variant automatically, and iterate based on visual feedback.
Anima operates in the design-to-code and AI front-end generation market alongside competitors such as Locofy, Builder.io's Visual Copilot, and TeleportHQ, as well as broader AI app builders. Comparative reviews tend to characterize the tools by how their output is structured. Locofy is often described as producing developer-friendly component code with flexbox layouts and named components that map to Figma layer names. Builder.io's Visual Copilot is noted for a multi-stage AI pipeline that maps designs to a user's existing React components, using an open-source compiler (Mitosis) for multi-framework output across React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Qwik, and Solid. Anima's historical plugin output has sometimes been described as a comparatively literal translation of a design, though the company emphasizes component reuse, design-system awareness, and, with Frontier and its API, generating code that conforms to an existing codebase. Reviewers have also highlighted Anima's strength in producing working, interactive prototypes for designers without hand-coding.
Anima's customer roster, as stated by the company, spans large enterprises and consultancies including Amazon, Apple, Samsung, Disney, Deloitte, and Accenture, and earlier references included Google, IBM, Netflix, Salesforce, Starbucks, and Verizon. The company says organizations using its platform deliver projects up to 50% faster and save up to 80% of front-end coding effort, figures that originate with Anima and have not been independently audited.
Figma AI - React - Next.js - Generative AI - AI code generation - Vibe coding - Large language model - AI agents - Model Context Protocol - Cursor - Vercel