After using Figma to create user interfaces and experiences, developers are left with the huge task of coding designs in order to create effective websites or apps. Locovya Singapore-based front-end development platform powered by Accel, wants to save hours of work with a one-click tool that instantly turns Figma and AdobeXD prototypes into code.
Locofy’s new tool is called Lightning and is built on the startup’s large design models (LDMs). Locofy’s founders, Hani Mittal and Suhaib Mohammed, compare this to how OpenAI pioneered LLM courses before ChatGPT introduced it to the rest of the world. They saw the need for a tool like Lightning because Developer shortage Which leads to loss of revenue for companies and fatigue of programmers due to their workloads.
Lightning works as a plug-in for Figma, and Locofy’s founders say it automates approximately 80% of front-end development, so developers at lean startups can focus on running their startups and go-to-market instead.
The tool will be released for Figma first, for websites and web apps. Then later this year, it will be available for more design tools, including AdobeXD, Penpot, Sketch, Wix, and perhaps Canva and Notion.
Mittal says the company has invested more than $1 million in Lightning development, aiming to reach startups and customer-focused enterprises with small teams that need to accelerate their front-end development process. Lightning and its LDM models are built in-house and trained on a dataset that includes millions of designs.
The company started with Locofy Classic in 2021, which required users to follow five steps: design improvements; Labeling interactive elements; Design to make designs work on different screen sizes; Components and props to define recurring elements and make them standard; Allow class name modifications; And adapt to preferred configurations such as typewriter or JS.
Mittal and Mohammed learned how each step can be automated using a range of techniques such as image-based neural networks, including multimodal transformers, graph-based neural networks, sequence-to-sequence models, stacked pointer networks, heuristic models, and LLMs. They say they used those elements to build a large, unified design model, with nearly half a billion parameters from millions of designs.
Each of Locofy Lightning’s steps, including labeling, layer grouping, responsiveness, components, and class names, powers its own set of AI-based technologies, which are then fine-tuned using heuristics. The steps are then condensed into just one, so Lightning can be implemented with a single click.
Once the front-end code is created, users can review it, as well as interactively preview and fine-tune the code before exporting it.
Founded in 2021, Locofy has raised $7.5 million from investors including Accel and Northstar Ventures.
In the future, it plans to expand its platform beyond design to code by including tools that build design systems, use public UI libraries, and build backends for frontends with integrations like Github Copilot and CI-CD. It also plans to include an AI assistant for designers and hosting and publishing to host full applications.
Locofy has been in free trial for two years, with plans to monetize in 2024. Its founders told TechCrunch that creating AI code is a new category, and that the business models will be different from SaaS and other developer tools. Locofy is still finalizing its pricing, but it will depend on things like how many screens or components are converted into code and maintained on a regular basis using AI.