Company Overview
Zeplin Inc was founded in 2014 by Pelin Kenez (CEO), Berkan Gulel (CTO), and Mustafa Erden. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an R&D center in Izmir, Turkey. Zeplin is a specialized design handoff and collaboration platform that bridges the gap between designers and developers. It automatically generates specs, code snippets, style guides, and assets from design tools such as Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD, enabling seamless design-to-development handoff.
Product Matrix
- Zeplin: Core design handoff platform that auto-generates design specs, CSS/SwiftUI/Android XML code snippets, color and typography style guides, and multi-platform asset export
- Zeplin Extensions: Plugin system integrating with Sentry, Jira, Confluence, Notion, Slack, and other third-party tools to extend workflow capabilities
- Zeplin for Developers: Developer-focused module to view design specs and component code without requiring a design tool license
- Zeplin for Designers: Designer-focused module for publishing design projects, organizing component libraries, and managing version history
- Style Guide Generator: Automatically generates design system documentation with unified display of colors, typography, spacing, and design tokens
Core Strengths
Automated Design Handoff: Automatically generates specs, color codes, and asset slices from design files, reducing manual rework
Multi-Tool Compatibility: Supports import from Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD and other major design tools without vendor lock-in
Code Snippet Generation: Exports CSS, Swift, Android XML and other platform-native code formats to reduce UI implementation cost
Version Control: Maintains version history of design projects with publish and rollback capabilities
Extension Ecosystem: Push design data to project management, bug tracking, and collaboration tools via Extensions
Key Milestones
- 2014: Founded by Pelin Kenez, Berkan Gulel, and Mustafa Erden
- 2015: Launched on Product Hunt, quickly gaining traction among designers and developers
- 2017: Released Zeplin Extensions, integrating with Sentry, Jira, and other third-party services
- 2018: Launched Style Guide Generator for automated design specification documentation
- 2020: Significant user growth due to surging remote work demand
- 2023+: Deepened Figma integration and introduced AI-assisted specs and automated workflows
Market Position
Zeplin occupies a unique niche in the design handoff space, competing with:
- Figma Dev Mode: Figma's built-in developer mode, the most significant competitive threat to Zeplin
- Avocode: Design handoff and spec tool supporting Photoshop and Sketch file parsing
- InVision Inspect: Design inspection tool from InVision, declining in influence as InVision's business contracted
- Specctr: Design annotation and asset export tool
- Measure: Sketch plugin for design specification annotation