IBM Backs Tel Aviv's Anima, Which Turns Designs Into Working Code

The Israeli artificial intelligence company Anima has announced a strategic investment from IBM, intended to speed up enterprise adoption of its AI-powered design-to-code platform. IBM said the investment would strengthen Anima's role in reshaping how organisations design, build and scale digital products in the AI era.

Anima was founded in 2017 and is backed by Y Combinator, the American startup accelerator. Its platform lets product teams build applications by describing what they want to an AI system, and integrates with design tools including Figma, the browser-based interface design program that has become the default in most product teams. Anima said global brands including Amazon, Apple and Samsung use the platform, and that teams deliver projects up to 50% faster.

What "design-to-code" actually means

Interface design and front-end engineering have long been separate crafts joined by a manual handover: a designer produces a visual layout, and an engineer rebuilds it in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Design-to-code tools try to collapse that gap by generating the working code directly from the design file.

According to SiliconANGLE, Anima's platform converts layouts from Figma, Adobe XD and Sketch into production-ready responsive code. The same report says IBM did not disclose the size of its investment, and that the company's rationale is that language models are better at understanding code structure than at reasoning about pictures, so the useful output of a design tool is living, interactive code rather than a static artefact.

Anima's own announcement describes it as an API-first platform with more than 1.5 million installs, and lists Disney, Deloitte and Accenture alongside the customers named above. It attributes to customers both the 50% delivery speed-up and savings of up to 80% in front-end coding effort. Emily Fontaine, IBM's global head of venture capital, said in the release that Anima's "impressive adoption is driven from a technology platform that has resonated with enterprise product and design teams, helping cement them as a leader in AI design-to-code".

Why IBM is buying into "vibe coding"

The investment sits inside a broader shift the industry has taken to calling vibe coding: generating and refining software through natural-language prompts rather than writing it line by line, with the human role moving from typing code to steering it. SiliconANGLE frames IBM's move as a bet on that shift reaching large enterprises, where the bottleneck is less the writing of code than the repeated translation of designs into it across hundreds of screens and products.

An unusually quiet company in a loud funding year

Anima has not been a frequent fundraiser. SiliconANGLE reports that the company last raised outside funding in September 2021, more than four years before the IBM investment. Neither report gave the size of that earlier round.

That is against a backdrop of an Israeli technology sector concentrating money into fewer, bigger bets. Globes, reporting Startup Nation Central's annual figures in December 2025, said Israeli technology companies raised $15.6 billion in private funding across 717 rounds (the lowest number of rounds in a decade), with the median deal size up 67% year on year to $10 million and mega-rounds accounting for about half of all capital raised. Business software attracted $4.5 billion of the total.

What is still unclear

Neither Anima nor IBM disclosed how much IBM invested, what stake it took, or whether the deal carries any commercial or distribution arrangement between the two companies. The announcement did not say how the 50% speed figure was measured or across how many customers, and gave no revenue or headcount figures for Anima.