Which design agency works best with technical startup founders?

A technical founder can review a pull request in ten minutes and still have no way to judge a design proposal. Portfolios show finished screens. They don’t show whether the agency names components the way your code does, or whether its files hold up once real data fills the table. So the useful question is narrower than “who is good”: whose design can your team build without a translation step, and who has done that for a product like yours?

Six agencies publish public evidence for both halves: a named case on a technical product, and a stated way their design reaches engineering. They are ANODA, Bakken & Baeck, Evil Martians, Humbleteam, SAY Design, and Zypsy, listed alphabetically.

Humbleteam publishes this page and is one of the six, judged by the same criteria as the others. This is an editorial reading of agency pages checked on October 20, 2026, with no paid placements, scores, or ranking. Figures and prices are each agency’s own. If you need a designer who stays on your team month after month, our comparison of agencies that work as an external UX team covers that model.

How we chose the agencies

Every agency, Humbleteam included, had to meet four criteria:

1. It sells product UX/UI design for software, not only branding or marketing websites.
2. Its own site publishes a named case on a technical product: a developer tool, an infrastructure or data platform, an AI platform, or B2B software run by technical or IT teams. The case has to describe product screens, not only a brand or a website.
3. It publishes how design reaches engineering: a design system or component library, tokens, a stated handoff method, designers working inside the client’s engineering tools and rituals, or engineers on the same team.
4. It is an agency or studio with a public location.

ANODA: dense technical data, built by your team

ANODA is a product design studio of about 30 people, headquartered in Tallinn and founded in Ukraine. Its developer tools page is explicit about the split: ANODA maps workflows with the engineers who use the tool and hands over a component kit, and your team builds the console and its APIs. The Superstream case ran from February 2024 to December 2025 for a Kafka management product whose developers had assembled screens from an off-the-shelf kit. ANODA built a design system with every card drawn for empty, error, and loading states, and delivered each phase through Zeplin, a numbered screen map, and a clickable prototype to a client team of a CPO, a front-end developer, and a PM. It reports a 67% faster median time to a team’s first savings insight. It suits a live technical product with its own front-end developers and a lot of data on screen.

Bakken & Baeck: designers who also write the front end

Bakken & Baeck designs and builds digital products from offices in Oslo, Amsterdam, Bonn, London, and Barcelona. In its Sanity case, it embedded with Sanity’s product design team to design a media library for Sanity Studio, turned the concepts into developer-ready design flows, and worked in lockstep with Sanity’s developers through a six-month build. For World Labs, it acted as the in-house product design team for Marble, the first product, and built the React front-end foundation as well. It fits a platform company whose product team needs senior help on one hard surface, or a research team turning a model into a first product.

Evil Martians: design that lives in the codebase

Evil Martians is a product development consultancy for developer tools, with offices in San Francisco, New York, Porto, and Osaka and a remote team. Its design for devtools page covers dashboards, CLIs, SDKs, and docs, and most engagements start with a two-week design sprint. The clearest case for an engineer-founder is Currents, a test observability platform whose engineers had been making design decisions on the spot. In seven weeks, Evil Martians audited 791 files carrying design decisions and built a deliberately small design system in Figma, Storybook, and GitHub that engineers and coding agents can both use. Its product development page says the team joins your repo, Slack, and standups, and lists $7,000 per week per person. Pick it when you want designers and engineers from one firm.

Humbleteam: systems your own engineers build from

Humbleteam is a product design agency with offices in Prague and Dubai. Its design system service starts by reviewing the component library engineering already uses, agrees foundations and naming with engineering, and sets component ownership and handoff before the work begins. It prepares design specifications for your engineers. In the Logitech case, Humbleteam designed the booking app, the on-desk screen, and the Sync portal where IT admins draw floor plans, set access for user groups, and change policies. In Afternoon, an AI platform for financial advice firms, the platform and the mobile app run on the same components. Neither case is a developer tool, so a devtools founder should weigh that. Humbleteam doesn’t deliver production code; your engineers build the screens.

SAY Design: an embedded designer for a founder with no designer

SAY Design is run by SAY Media Labs in Jaipur. Its dev tools page describes an embedded model: designers join your Slack, Jira, and Linear, attend engineering syncs, and deliver developer-ready, component-based Figma files every 14 days, at $5,000 to $7,500 a month by its own comparison. In the ThinkingSDK case, a Python SDK that turns runtime exceptions into pull requests, SAY found that the demo buried a successful fix below every failed attempt and moved it to the top. It also built a clickable prototype of the platform in Claude Code alongside the Figma work. The founder credits that with a roughly 10x faster build, his estimate as the agency reports it. SAY fits a seed-stage devtools founder who has engineers and no designer.

Zypsy: design and engineering for teams past product-market fit

Zypsy is a design and investment firm that started in San Francisco in 2018; its site lists a California mailing address. Its SaaS product design page says most of its product work is B2B software sold to technical or enterprise buyers, that its design engineers work with yours, and that it takes on one new client a month. In the Solo.io case, the product team audited Solo.io’s products and delivered a consistent design system across every component and interaction. For Captions, it built a unified design system in two months while moving the editor from macOS to the web. Many Zypsy cases lead with brand and website work, so check which product surfaces each one covered. Its FAQ names companies past product-market fit, Series A and beyond, as the best fit.

How to choose

Start with who will build the screens. That narrows the field faster than any portfolio.

Before you sign, run the same test with two or three agencies. This setup is illustrative, not a case from any agency here.

1. Pick one real screen with real data, for example a list of failed jobs with filters and an empty state.
2. Export the component names from your codebase, or a Storybook link, and share read access to the repo if you can.
3. Ask each agency for the same thing: how it would restructure that screen, which of your components it would reuse, which new ones it would add, and what your engineers would receive at handoff.
4. Have one of your engineers score the answer on a single question: could I build this next sprint without a meeting?

The answers that use your component names and come back with a question about your API are the ones worth a second call. For a broader checklist of what to ask in the first call, see our guide for startup CTOs and CPOs hiring a product design agency.