Anisse kept Relume bootstrapped and turned down acquisition offers to build an AI website builder that assembles sites from human-designed components.
Dan Anisse is co-founder and chief executive of Relume, a website design company in Sydney, Australia, whose AI turns a short brief into a sitemap, wireframes, and a marketing site. He runs it with co-founder Adam Mura.
Starting Businesses in Tech and Fashion
Anisse studied economics and founded businesses in technology and fashion before Relume, according to Starter Story. He and Mura spent years trying business ideas together, and they ran a web design agency that built sites in Webflow and Figma.
Turning Agency Components Into a Library
Agency work showed them that many web projects repeated the same building blocks. They built a component library for their own projects, tested demand by sharing free clonable designs with the Webflow community, and launched the Relume Library in November 2021. A community Slack for users grew to almost 4,500 members.
Turning Down Acquisition Offers
Relume added AI that generates sitemaps and wireframes from a few sentences of text, and by March 2024 more than 250,000 websites had been designed and built with it. That month The Age reported that the bootstrapped company had rejected several acquisition offers of $25 million to $35 million, with its co-founders aiming to build a company as large as Canva instead.
