DesignOps Is Becoming a Real Software Category. Here's Who's Building It

Figma sold to Adobe for $20 billion. Canva crossed a $40 billion valuation. Miro raised at $17.5 billion. The design tools market has never been short on money. But the companies attracting the biggest checks have all been solving the same problem: helping designers make things. A different kind of company is now raising money to solve the problem that none of those tools touch.

The pitch is simple. Designers do not actually spend most of their time designing. They spend it on operational work that nobody trained them to do and nobody has built decent software for. The emerging category chasing this gap is called DesignOps, and it has gone from a term that barely existed two years ago to a space with real venture dollars, real products, and a growing body of evidence suggesting the underlying problem is much larger than most people in the industry realized.

Putting a Number on the Problem

A feature in HUGE Magazine published earlier this year laid out the case in specific terms. Rahmi Halaby, CEO of Philadelphia-based startup Ideate, spent two years talking to more than 1,200 designers. Freelancers, agency leads, in-house teams at major consumer brands, creative directors running departments of 50. The result was stark: 22 hours per week. That is how much time the average designer spends on operational tasks like building presentations, managing feedback cycles, organizing files, resizing assets, and assembling brand decks. The remaining 18 hours go to actual creative work.

Figma’s own 2025 research backs this up from a different angle. The company found that 57 percent of creative teams spend more than a quarter of their total work time on non-creative tasks.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts roughly 266,000 graphic designers employed in the US at a median salary of $61,300, and that figure does not include UX designers, product designers, or the growing ranks of in-house brand teams. When HUGE ran the math on a 100-person design team losing 22 hours per designer per week, the result came to approximately $28 million a year in salary paid for work that produces no creative output.

InVision, before it shut down permanently last December, had surveyed 2,200 organizations and found that only five percent of companies were leveraging design at what it considered full maturity. The rest were stuck in various combinations of underinvestment and operational friction. InVision’s collapse is itself instructive. The company was once valued at $2 billion and had raised more than $350 million. Figma made its core prototyping product obsolete, and InVision never pivoted fast enough to survive.

The Companies Chasing the Gap

The DesignOps space now has a handful of startups attacking different pieces of the operational stack.

Ideate has taken the broadest approach. The company’s Moodboard Studio, a collaborative visual reference tool, launched on Product Hunt in September and attracted a waitlist north of 4,900 designers, including people at Apple, Meta, Urban Outfitters, and IBM. Ideate also ships a Feedback Copilot that uses language models to translate vague client direction into specific design tasks, along with automated brand deck builders and mockup generators. Each feature corresponds to a specific time sink that Halaby’s interviews identified. The company has raised from early angels and went through Bronze Valley Delaware’s gBETA accelerator.

Air has the most capital behind it. The San Francisco company has raised $76.8 million across seven rounds, including a $35 million Series B led by Avenir in January 2025. Tiger Global, Lerer Hippeau, and WndrCo are on the cap table. The platform manages more than 120 million creative assets for over 2,100 businesses and focuses on organizing, approving, and distributing visual content at scale.

Creative Force raised $8.9 million in a Series A from EIFO and Hearst Ventures in late 2023 and has since acquired ShotFlow. The company sits in a narrower lane, coordinating creative workflows specifically for e-commerce product photography and content production at large retailers.

Smartsheet paid $155 million to acquire Brandfolder in 2020 and followed up with the acquisition of Outfit in 2022, signaling that the enterprise market considered digital asset management a category worth buying into rather than building from scratch.

The Incumbents Are Watching

Then there is the platform question. Figma and Canva are not standing still while startups carve out a new category between their products and the teams using them.

At Config 2025, Figma unveiled four new products. Figma Make uses Anthropic’s Claude to generate website source code from text descriptions. Figma Sites lets designers deploy directly from the design tool. Figma Buzz builds brand and marketing assets at scale with AI. Each of these pushes Figma further from “design tool” toward “design platform,” and each one encroaches on territory that DesignOps startups are trying to claim.

Canva’s Magic Studio has been used more than five billion times according to an OpenAI case study. The company’s Magic Layers feature, launched in March 2026, converts flat AI images into fully editable multi-layered designs. Magic Design generates eight to ten complete design options from a single text prompt.

The question for every DesignOps startup is whether their product is specific enough and good enough to survive in a market where Figma and Canva have massive distribution advantages and are clearly moving toward operational features. The startups have focus. The incumbents have reach. History says both can coexist if the problem is real enough. History also says InVision thought it could coexist with Figma and was wrong.

What Is Different in the Bay Area

The timing of this category matters locally. The Bay Area’s design consultancy landscape has shifted dramatically. IDEO, the firm that defined “design thinking” as a corporate practice, eliminated 32 percent of its headcount in October 2023 and closed its Munich and Tokyo offices. Revenue fell from roughly $300 million in 2019 to under $100 million by 2023. Frog Design, now part of Capgemini, has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs including one that cut 30 percent of the company. Lunar Design was absorbed by McKinsey in 2015. CCA, one of the Bay Area’s most respected design schools, was purchased by Vanderbilt University in January 2026 and plans to cease operations after the 2026-2027 academic year.

The traditional design agency model is contracting. What is replacing it looks different. Companies are investing in design internally. Airbnb runs five distinct DesignOps sub-teams managing everything from operational strategy to tool creation to what it calls “team happiness.” IBM improved its designer-to-engineer ratio from 1:72 to 1:8 over five years. Pinterest had a dedicated Head of Design Operations. The investment in design is growing, but it is moving in-house, which means the operational burden falls on the design team itself instead of being absorbed by agency overhead.

That is the market these startups are building for. Not the shrinking consultancy, but the growing internal team that needs to do more with the same headcount and has no project manager handling the non-creative work on its behalf. If the 22 hours are real, and the data from multiple sources suggests they are, then the software that reclaims even a fraction of that time has a large and underserved market waiting for it.