Noon raises $44M to build a visual code editor that unifies design and development in one tool

Speaker 7: you doing? Hey. Hey, John. Hey, Charlie. I'm doing good. How are you folks?

Speaker 1: We're doing great. Great. Welcome Great

Speaker 6: to you

Speaker 2: the show. Since it's the first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

Speaker 7: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for having me. My name is Aditya Bandi. I am the cofounder of Noon. And, yeah, I'm, you know, originally, you know, from India. I moved here to the Bay Area in 2015 as part of my first startup getting acquired by Yahoo. Mhmm. I'm a product designer turned product manager and a second time founder. Yeah. You know, I have a cofounder. His his name is Kushagra. He's also a product designer turned second time founder. Yeah.

Speaker 2: What was the first company?

Speaker 7: So we were actually you know, back in 2013, there was this problem of, like, rendering PDFs and Word documents inside apps.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 7: And, basically, I was building this company called Bookpad out of Bangalore, and we we can render 13 plus formats in any app. So someone like Dropbox could integrate with us and

Speaker 6: Oh.

Speaker 7: Start rendering documents. So that's the company we built, and Yahoo bought it for Yahoo Mail Yeah. So we can part of the whole attachment attachment layer for Yahoo

Speaker 3: Mail.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you're in Yahoo Mail and you need to open a PDF, it just opens in the browser natively.

Speaker 7: Yeah. Word document.

Speaker 2: Is how how much of that is a technical challenge and then how much of that is just sort of dealing with like, you know, Adobe IP? Because I imagine that like Adobe has products and they maintain a standard, but you you can use some of it, but there's pieces that you can't. Like, what were the decision making criteria around building the product then?

Speaker 7: Yeah. It was very complex. Like, you know, if you basically, all of these formats were not made for for cloud or for browser. They they were built in nineteen eighties. Like, if you open up any PDF or a Word document, it's insane how complex they look inside. So we have to build a a rendering engine. We have to build a a conversion layer that understands these documents and and tries to recreate them for for the cloud. So or or so that's that's basically a very technical challenge for us to to do that. Yeah. And we just were very, you know, young and happy and guys called some something very, very complex and that just made us very happy.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So so walk me through the decision to start the next company. What was that like? What was the okay. This is time to run it back.

Speaker 7: Yeah. So, yeah, my cofounder and I, we've been product designers all our lives. We love building products. And then we've been, like, observing the AI space. We've been, like, using design tools for last twenty years of our lives. Right? Like Sure. From from grad school. And then for the most part of, like, you know, all the tools that exist in the market, like, they're all graphic design tools. Like, you can design the visuals of the product Mhmm. But not not the product directly. So so designer is limited to designing the visuals, and then they hand off the visuals to the engineer to build it. That's how it was always done. Yeah. And the moment the AI coding tools came into the market, everyone started realizing, oh, I can build. I can do the functional aspect of it as well. And then they started realizing how amazing it is to do both together. Mhmm. But all of that was happening in multiple tools. It's all broken. Yep. And that's that was the idea behind this. Like, hey. Why is it happening in multiple tools? Why can't it all happen in one tool where someone who wants to design and build products can just do it all in one tool?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So, I mean, when you when you hear about vibe coding projects, you you hear about, like, insane lines of code, so much so much functionality, like, instantiated just to, you know, a couple sentences dropped in a prompt. What changes about the product design workflow in a world where sort of the entire underlying structure of the product can change on a dime all of a sudden?

Speaker 7: So the the the tools that are very text based Mhmm. So the problem is, like, they're very limited in in how you can say something. Right?

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 7: Now describe me a painting. Yeah. Let's say you start describing a painting, you can never fully describe the painting. Right? Yeah. That's the problem with text based editors or text based design tools.

Speaker 2: I mean, you hear

Speaker 8: a lot of people

Speaker 2: sharing that even just for, like, one off open claw tasks like texting an image or screenshot from their phone along with a prompt just to give a little bit more, hey, here's a screenshot of my calendar. I'm essentially exporting a bunch of information via PNG which is a richer format than people thought, I guess. And so how closely do you want to link the visual design elements, the interaction elements, the logic of how things fit together? Because, you know, like we've already sort of transitioned out of the, you know, visual designer in a pixel perfect like layered Photoshop file into something completely new and dynamic. But that that that barrier is bleeding and and or is is is becoming fuzzier, basically.

Speaker 7: I understand. And then then the way we look at it is if you if you're trying to understand, like, what what are we trying to do Mhmm. We are first of all, what we're saying is, we work on top of your product code. Mhmm. So, essentially, we we don't do any MCP. We don't need to do any sort of, like, any middle layer, like, plot or codecs. Like, we don't need any of that. We directly sit on top of your product Yeah. Code base. And then then what happens is, like, the the designers or anyone who's working on the product can see that that code visually rendered on the canvas.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 7: So now you can understand, okay. Okay. This is what my product looks like in different screens and different components. Yeah. And then from there, you have a lot of control to, you know, refine it, make it better, create new screens, create new features. Mhmm. So and then you don't need multiple tools.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 7: That's the second advantage. You're not switching between multiple tools. Things are not getting lost in translation. Yeah. You know, all the details are preserved. Yes. And the last thing is

Speaker 2: Oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The last thing.

Speaker 7: Yeah. And the last thing is, like, you work on both the functional and visual layer. Sure.

Speaker 6: So you

Speaker 7: you it's up to you. You you you build you build the visual first and add functionality. Yeah. You could you can control both of them, you know, very, very you know, in a fine tuned manner.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you're thinking about just something as simple as, like, making a CTA bigger and you're dragging the size of a button, that can be quicker in a visual format than in a prompt where maybe you wind up describing the number of pixels that you want it to be or say a little bit bigger, okay, little bit smaller. It can be tricky. But what is the flow of actions that are happening behind the scenes once I actually resize a button, for example?

Speaker 7: Yeah. So let's take the button as an example. Right? So first of all, the button that you're seeing on the canvas Yeah. It's not a rectangular shape. It there's real button code behind, so that's why it's getting rendered

Speaker 2: on

Speaker 7: canvas for you.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 7: Then then when you're actually, know, trying to edit the button visually or maybe using some, you know, AI there or maybe directly you're doing it, the code is getting edited Mhmm. In real time. So, essentially, you can think of us as, like, a visual code editor. So you edit the code visually. So we're kind of building a code editor from scratch that can be edited visually.

Speaker 2: Yeah. How are you thinking about going after customers? Do you wanna be in the enterprise or more self serve? Like, where where where's the beachhead? Yeah.

Speaker 1: And how how much how much of this round was based on traction to date versus long term opportunity and and scale of the market?

Speaker 7: Yeah. No. I think for us, like, you know, we're a design tool design tools. People wanna try it first before, like, even thinking of, like, before thinking of paying it or getting, like, into a team. So we'll always gonna be a a a free tier free tier use it for free. If you if you like it, then pay for it.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: That's also model. So we're gonna we're gonna be we're gonna be bottoms up that way. But in terms of the traction, like, we are currently, like, you know, lot of some of the best known tech companies in the Bay Area, we have pilots with them and they're going live.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: So a lot of that has helped us, like, first build the product with their feedback and then and then do pilots with them to make sure, like, you know, it's working for for a team, for serious work.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Talk about some of the angel investors in the round. How much did you raise?

Speaker 7: So we raised 44,000,000 overall. And, yeah, I think it's it's insane. It's an amazing amazing journey for us. And and some of the some of the investors that we have is, like, First Round Capital, Chemistry, F4, Scribble, Elevation. These are the VCs. Mhmm. But the most exciting part for me and my cofounder is that we have some of the best design and product minds in the industry part of the fundraise. Right? So Leo, the second designer at Facebook, investor in Vanta, Perplexitya. Yeah. Versal. Then we have Katie Dill, head of design at Stripe.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: Scott Belskya, founder of Behance. Then we have Mike Davison, head of mic design at Microsoft AI. Hendi Modiset, head of design at Publicitya Ian Silver, head of design at OpenAI. These are just some of the names. Like, we have Yeah. A lot. We we didn't share the full list actually for a fundraise. It's

Speaker 2: just Yeah.

Speaker 7: Some small yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That makes sense.

Speaker 7: Just how

Speaker 2: are you how are you tracking the way design is changing in the era of vibe coding? It feels like more and more small businesses, more companies are building custom software. A lot of it is sort of like internal facing, so design is more of an afterthought. But you have to imagine that if the software is valuable and provides growth a growth vector for the business, at some point, you're going to wind up with design challenges and trade offs. Is are are you thinking that this will be like a tool that's eventually dropped on top of like, a a a vibe coded system, or do you think this was more of, like, an entry point into a company building new tools internally?

Speaker 7: So all three types. Right? Like, let's say let's say the first type, an existing company, big product, let's say, you know, like Spotify or someone else like Dropbox. Yeah. They have an existing product. They can they can use the tool to build their next feature. Yeah. The vibe coding, if you let's say your site you're doing a site project, you vibe coded something on Lovable or some other some other white coding tools.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: You can

Speaker 7: build your you can bring in your project here almost instantly and start designing and working on it better. And you have the third one. You're starting from scratch. You can, of course, like, start from scratch very easily on tool and and then and then build your product. So can we kind of support all entry points? It's a very multipurpose tool that way.

Speaker 2: How are you thinking about business model? It this feels like very logical for seat based, and yet there's been so much pushback around the seat based model. You're sort of starting from scratch so you can pick your your your monetization method. What are you thinking of for the next couple of years?

Speaker 7: Yeah. I think right now, at least, like, we've we've been we're working on the pricing model. We're talking to a lot of customers to understand, like, what works for them. Yeah. We don't wanna break their budgets. Right? Like, there are certain budgets assigned already for this. So TBD, you know, we'll we'll soon publish our pricing on the website when we show the product as well. So very, very soon, you'll see you'll see the product go, you know, on on the website and the and the pricing going live.

Speaker 2: Very cool. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking time. Congratulations

Speaker 1: on round together. And we will talk to

Speaker 7: you soon. One You've a thing. Like, also have a I I got a Gong.

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. You have a Gong? I have a gong for you. Hit that gong.

Speaker 7: Because we've

Speaker 1: I couldn't hear you.

Speaker 2: I think Zoom I think the Zoom noise cancellation just completely killed the gong head. We'll hit the gong again. We'll hit our Yeah. No. It's the next week. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you. It's it's great to have you on. I'm sure you'll be back on.

Speaker 2: We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 1: We'll talk to

Speaker 7: you soon.

Speaker 1: Congrats to

Speaker 5: the whole team.

Speaker 7: Thanks, John.

Speaker 2: Have a good rest of your day. Name a street. We are counting down the minutes. How long do we have? Twenty nine minutes. WordPress still in

Speaker 1: the Still at number one at a 100