raylu · 2023

I designed the Figma file Raylu, then an ML-tooling startup, carried into its seed pitch meetings.

raylu — workspace.fig
First palette explorations, the whale mascot, and the headline thesis: “tools to make ML safe.”
Raylu pixel-art whale mascot on teal.
raylu tools to make ML safe
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The file's five pages. The last one holds the prototype's components, each in its states.

$4MRaylu's seed round, closed in 2023

Raylu UMAP slice surface, a real Figma frame: a left rail with the raylu wordmark and nav icons, a left control panel (point size, opacity, thumbnail size, a reduction-algorithm dropdown set to UMAP, an annotation field set to 'vehicle'), and a 2D embedding scatterplot of green and orange point clusters. vehicle · 47 images
A screen from the clickable prototype. Drag a box around the green cluster, or press Enter.

Raylu

You just got the link

One file opens, each page dated as it was added. It ran demos without me there, and the founders could update the pitch on their own.

The product was in their heads

Two founders, a deep ML product, nothing an investor could hold. The brief was to make it readable enough to fund and build. A sketch over Zoom in the morning, a clickable frame back that afternoon.

An investor makes a slice

The prototype had to make an ML primitive legible to a non-engineer mid-demo: drag a box around a cluster and it becomes a named slice.

What followed

The file went into engineering. Conversion Capital and Unusual Ventures led the seed, with angels including Arash Ferdowsi. I claim no causal chain. Raylu has since pivoted to AI sourcing for private-market investors, and raised an $8M Series A in late 2025.

under the hood

  1. rolesole designer

    Six months of work, on and off, from January to October 2023.

  2. the fileFigma

    Investor deck, product spec, engineering handoff and brand bible in one navigable workspace.

  1. prototypesFigma · Zoom

    Clickable hi-fi, its component patterns mapped 1:1 to the React build.