betaworks

Dessn raises $6M for production design tool

Dessn, a startup building a production‑focused design tool that runs customers' codebases in the cloud without setup, has raised $6 million. The round was led by Connect Ventures with participation from Betaworks and N49P. Founded by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn aims to give designers high-fidelity access to production environments so handoffs to engineers are simpler. Early customers include Color, Wispr and Mercury. The product offers a free tier (one repository and five prompts weekly) and paid plans starting at $39 per user/month. The four-person company plans selective integrations (Slack, meeting notetakers) but says it will not integrate with Figma to preserve its production-first focus.

Era raises $11M to build AI gadget platform

Era, a startup building a software layer to power AI-driven consumer gadgets, has raised $11 million to date. The company offers an orchestration platform that helps hardware makers create AI agents and manage multimodal inputs, model routing and real-world constraints (connectivity, memory, etc.). Era provides access to over 130 LLMs from more than 14 providers and intends to enable millions of devices while allowing users to choose memory and model providers in a privacy-preserving way. The $11M includes a $9M seed round led by Abstract Ventures and BoxGroup with participation from Collaborative Fund and Mozilla Ventures, plus a $2M pre-seed from Topology Ventures and Betaworks. Era was founded by CEO Liz Dorman, CTO Alex Ollman and CPO Megan Gole and plans to target hardware makers and the open-source/maker community rather than building devices itself.

Digg Restructures: Layoffs and App Shutdown Amid Bot Crisis

Digg announced it has laid off a sizable portion of its staff and removed its mobile app from the App Store as the company retools. Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said the startup is not closing; instead, co‑owner Kevin Rose will return to focus on Digg full‑time while remaining an advisor at True Ventures. The company cited an overwhelming problem with bots and sophisticated AI agents that undermined its vote‑based ranking system, saying it banned tens of thousands of accounts and deployed tooling and vendors but could not sufficiently control spam. A small team will continue to rebuild the product. Rose and Alexis Ohanian previously acquired the remnants of Digg in a leveraged buyout with investors including True Ventures, Seven Seven Six and S32; funding terms were not disclosed.