Modulz

Modulz was a Dublin-based software company building a visual code editor that allowed teams to design, develop, document and deploy a design system without writing code. The product was intended to close the gap between design and engineering by replacing the conventional "developer handoff", in which design teams produce static representations of a component library and pass them to engineers. Modulz packaged a handoff as a complete design system consisting of a theme of reusable tokens, a production-ready component library published to NPM, an automatically generated styleguide with component examples, code snippets, navigation and search, and integrations that exported the system to Sketch, Figma and Framer. Publishing a new version of a design system updated all export targets automatically so that design and engineering teams stayed in sync.

Alongside the editor, Modulz produced two widely used open-source projects. Radix is a collection of unstyled, accessible components for building design systems, reported at over four million monthly downloads and used by companies including Linear, Supabase, Vercel and WorkOS. Stitches is a CSS-in-JS library with more than two thousand community members on Discord, used in production by companies including Basement, CodeSandbox and the University of Amsterdam. In June 2022 Modulz was acquired by WorkOS, a San Francisco-headquartered developer platform for enterprise features such as single sign-on and directory sync; the Modulz product was shut down and the team moved to WorkOS to continue work on UI components and open-source software.

Founding story

Modulz was founded by Colm Tuite and Stephen Haney around 2018 with the stated aim of fixing the disconnect between design and code and redefining the workflow between designers and developers. Tuite had previously developed the design and animation tool Plexi, which was acquired by UK start-up Marvel in 2015 for an undisclosed sum. The company was initially financed through a Kickstarter campaign that raised $36,000 from roughly 394 backers who pre-paid for early access, before institutional seed funding followed in 2019.

Business model

Modulz developed a commercial visual design-system editor, offered initially through pre-paid early access sold via Kickstarter and later through a beta programme, while maintaining free open-source developer libraries (Radix and Stitches) that built community adoption. The company did not reach product-market fit for its commercial product before being acquired.

Traction

The Kickstarter campaign drew $36,000 from 394 backers. By the September 2019 seed announcement the team was nine people and the product had not publicly launched. By June 2022 Radix had more than four million monthly downloads and Stitches had over two thousand Discord community members and production use at companies including CodeSandbox and the University of Amsterdam.

Latest developments

WorkOS announced the acquisition of Modulz on 1 June 2022, alongside an $80m Series B led by Greenoaks. Modulz beta accounts stayed live through June 2022 and the company was shut down on 1 July 2022, with Radix and Stitches continuing under WorkOS and the Modulz team joining WorkOS to work on UI components and open-source software.