Felix Haas is a German designer.

He was one of the first designers at Lovable, one of the fastest-growing software companies in history, and today he helps lead its design team.

Alongside Lovable, he advises and works with a small circle of companies, from the frontier of artificial intelligence to brands known for their craft.

He founded his first company at eighteen and has since been the first designer at a series of hyper-growth companies. Business Insider has called him one of the most sought-after designers in the European start-up scene.

As an investor, he has backed more than 30 start-ups. He is a Scout for Sequoia Capital and was one of Creandum’s first Designers in Residence.

Felix lives and works between Stockholm, London and New York.

Early life and education

Born in 1998 in Düsseldorf, Germany, to parents who ran a fashion business, Felix grew up around collections, galleries and art fairs, where he first learned to look closely at form and detail.

As a teenager, he discovered a passion for making things and taught himself to design and develop his own consumer apps.

He went on to study business and management at the Technical University of Munich, and then business and design at Harvard University. After a year, he left Harvard to devote himself fully to building products of his own.

Career

Skip App

Skip App, which Felix founded while still at school, was where his life as a founder began. The app let people share photos instantly with those around them.

He designed and built the app himself, raised a pre-seed round from angel investors in Munich and Los Angeles, and moved to Palo Alto, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Skip App launched on the App Store in early 2018. While it did not turn out to be the success he had hoped for, it taught him how to build a company, design a product end to end, bring it to market and win its first users.

It was the beginning of everything that followed, and the reason he became a designer.

Mapify

In the Bay Area, Felix met Patrick Haede, co-founder of the travel platform Mapify, who became, and remains, one of his closest collaborators. He joined Mapify as its founding designer, later became head of design and shaped the product end to end.

Apple featured Mapify in App Stores worldwide several times and, from 2019, preinstalled it on the devices in its stores, holding it up as an example of what a well-designed app can be. The company raised more than $3 million in venture capital and was acquired by HomeToGo in 2021.

Gorillas and independent practice

His work at Mapify opened the door to a series of early-stage companies. In October 2020, at twenty-two, Felix became the first designer at Gorillas, the Berlin grocery-delivery start-up that went on to become one of the fastest-growing companies in European history.

Working side by side with the founders, he designed its first app and laid the foundations of its brand.

He was also the first designer at Arive and, over time, became a design partner to companies from their first product through rapid growth.

Creandum and Blossom Design

In January 2022, Felix joined the venture capital firm Creandum as a Designer in Residence. He worked alongside the investment team, supporting portfolio companies with product design and with building their design teams.

Later that year, he and Johanna Weber founded Blossom Design, a product and brand studio that allowed them to partner with several companies at once. Sonic acquired the studio in September 2024.

Lovable

After a period in Paris advising and investing in start-ups, Felix met the founders of Lovable at an event in London. Convinced by what they were building, he invested in the company.

In March 2025, he joined the team himself, and he has helped lead its design ever since.

Advisory

The companies Felix advises have little in common at first glance. Some are shaping artificial intelligence; others have refined their craft over decades and are now carrying it into new products and physical experiences.

To both he brings the same eye for how something should look, work and feel.

Investing

Felix’s investing grew out of his work with founders, from his first angel investments to his role, since 2025, as a Scout for Sequoia Capital.

With Patrick Haede, he also hosts Quick Coffee, a podcast and investment vehicle. Standing by founders from the very beginning is one of the parts of his work he values most.

Writing and speaking

In his newsletter, Felix writes about interface design, artificial intelligence and start-ups; writing is how he makes sense of what he sees. His essays include “Kind Products Win” (2025) and “Invisible Interfaces” (2026).

He speaks regularly at conferences and gives guest lectures around the world, including at Slush, TechCrunch and Founders Forum.

Personal projects

Alongside his work, he has pursued many personal projects. The latest, launching soon, is Letters from Felix: letters to people who have inspired him, written in the belief that we too rarely tell people what they have meant to us.

Haas Foundation

Together with his sister, Hanna Haas, Felix serves as a managing director of the Haas Foundation, the family’s foundation. Its first projects will be announced soon.

Design philosophy and influences

For Felix, design is the composition of a feeling. Every product leaves one behind, intended or not, and everything in it plays a part: the words, the typography, the spacing, the way things move and how they respond to a touch.

That feeling is right only when every element is in harmony with the rest, like a symphony in which no instrument is louder than the piece. When something is out of tune, people sense it, even if they cannot say what it is.

This is what makes him a minimalist. In his work, every element has to earn its place: a button appears only when there is something to do, and whatever does not serve the whole is left out.

What remains follows the same principles throughout, so that nothing has to be learned twice. The aim is something that never feels like too much, and that people are glad to return to.

Few people shaped Felix as much as his grandmother, Ilse Haas, to whom he was very close. An icon of fashion and design, she collected art from an early age and lived in an architect-designed house she had built for herself.

When he was a child, she took him everywhere with her, to openings and exhibitions. Perhaps the most opinionated woman he has ever known, she would tell him what she liked and show him what to look for.

Her opinions sparked much of his own thinking, and somewhere along the way he found his own taste. Today he collects art himself, and many of the works in his collection were once hers.

He thinks of her often and still sees her in his work. He feels a responsibility to carry her eye for beauty and her sense of good design forward, and he is deeply grateful to her.

Thanks for reading my story.
To be continued,

Credits

I feel an immense amount of gratitude to be surrounded by the most thoughtful, kind and curious people. In no particular order, a big thank you to:

Stefan KastenmüllerLeni B. ZimmermannSidney FrancoisEduard WieandtClara HoffmannJohanna WeberBernd GandrasPuneet SharmaLeonard SeitzPatrick HaedeLudwig BuhrHendrik HölzerVincent BodoDennis MüllerAdrian KiehnJames BakerAnton OsikaMona SalemChris HeyerLeon DrieseKeno PeerLukas Haas

& my family and friends.