About a month has passed since securing Seed funding, and Israeli startup Anima announces the launch of its premier technological solution. The company’s new product will turn Figma designs (one of the more popular design tools) into react code.

Focusing on the code developers can control

To date, Anima’s system enabled design teams to continue working with their standard tools, like Sketch, Adobe XD, and Figma, and at the end of the process  Anima’s plug-in tool exports the design into HTML and into an operational prototype, including animation, files, and project assets.

Now, Anima’s version 4.0 adds the option to automate developer-friendly react code to the Figma, XD, and Sketch designs. “During our journey, we came to the conclusion that automating production-ready code would be the dream. Development teams would never add code that they can not control, change, or maintain. Therefore, our solution focuses on empowering developers to write code that they can accomplish all those…,” said Anima CEO Avishay Cohen in a conversation with Geektime.

According to Cohen, there are no automated tools that enable efficient conversion of design to code on the market today: “Existing tools generate thousands of lines of code that make it almost impossible to make anything useful from them.” As a result, he explains, Anima has created an ecosystem tailored for developers to choose design elements on which they would like to focus, and receive the relevant code for this task.

Aren’t you scared of Figma launching a similar feature?

“Converting design into code is a whole world in itself. It means to change the current manual-developer-powered task and automate it. That’s a real issue, it’s quicksand and it’s this that we’re trying to solve. Figma provides a different solution to the design to code process. Figma is a groundbreaking design tool, but we’re not operating in the same universe. We come in one step after the design, in the crevice between design and development.”

Anima was founded in 2017 by Cohen, his wife and CPO Michal, and CTO Or Arbel, who was one of the co-founders of the controversial Yo project.  Since the company’s last funding round, Anima’s workforce has significantly grown, from previously 5 employees to 17 globally distributed workers - from Australia to NYC, and even in Morocco. The company offers a wide array of solutions that cost anywhere from free to $31 bucks for the Pro version.