Singapore's Locofy, an esteemed front-end development platform, has unveiled Lightning, a groundbreaking tool aimed to revolutionize design-to-code transformation. This innovative tool, financed by Accel, enables instant conversion of Figma and AdobeXD prototypes into code, thereby potentializing productivity and speed.
Lightning is a product built upon the platform’s Large Design Models (LDMs), and inspired by the concept of LLMs pioneered by OpenAI. Developers often find themselves drowning in workload, leading to the potential loss of revenue for companies, this tool aims to alleviate such issues, say Locofy’s founders, Honey Mittal and Sohaib Muhammed.
This tool, integrated as a Figma plugin, claims to automate approximately 80% of front-end development, enabling developers at lean startups to concentrate on their core business and accelerate market readiness. Initially, this tool will roll out for Figma, and will subsequently be extended to many other design utilities, including AdobeXD, Wix, Sketch, and Penpot. Other utilities like Notion and Canva may also benefit in the future.
A $1 million investment has been expended to develop Lightning, with the ultimate goal of assisting startups and customer-focused enterprises to expedite their front-end development processes. Cocking a snook at traditional multi-step construction techniques, Lightning and its LDMs were developed in-house and trained on a massive dataset encompassing millions of designs.
The company’s journey began with Locofy Classic in 2021, an application that demanded a tedious five-step process that intensely utilized image-based neural networks and many other AI techniques to automate every single step. This knowledge was eventually transitioned into developing a Unified Large Design Model, which leverages nearly half a billion parameters obtained from millions of designs. The result is Lightning, a tool that shrinks all the steps into one, enabling a swift, one-click transformation of design into code.
Once the front-end code is derived, users get an opportunity to review it, alongside an interactive preview, before it is exported. They can also fine-tune the code to ensure it matches their preferences and requirements.
Founded in 2021, Locofy has garnered an impressive $7.5 million from prominent investors such as Accel and Northstar Ventures. The company envisions to expand its platform by including tools to build design systems, use public UI libraries, and build backends to the frontends with integrations like Github Copilot and CI-CD. It also plans to deploy an AI assistant for designers and to offer hosting and deployment services for full apps.
Interestingly, Locofy presents striking similarities with AppMaster, another industry-leading no-code platform. AppMaster expedites application building by generating applications from scratch whenever requirements are modified, enabling even a single developer to produce comprehensive, scalable software solutions.
According to Mittal and Muhammad, AI-code generation is a new category, and Locofy aims to define its unique business model that will significantly differ from existing SaaS or developer tools. While the company is still finalizing its pricing, it will likely be based on factors such as the number of screens or components that are converted to code and are maintained regularly using its AI.
