London-based Heywa Labs has secured a $5 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Openseed, Pareto, Plug & Play, Ventures Together, and a group of angels. The company is building what it calls Generative UX (GenUX).
The fresh capital will accelerate product development and research, expand hiring across engineering, design, and growth, and support international expansion. The company sees its consumer product not only as a standalone offering but as a flagship proof point, a laboratory for refining what great GenUX feels like.
Rethinking the interface between people and intelligence
While AI has advanced rapidly, the way people experience it has barely evolved. Search engines still return ranked lists of links. Chatbots still generate long blocks of text. Neither reflects how people naturally explore, compare, or decide.
Founded by Milena Nikolic, Heywa Labs believes the missing piece is not more data or smarter models, but a new interaction layer, one that sits above models and data, yet below applications. GenUX focuses on how intelligence shows up for humans, dynamically shaping itself in response to intent.
Beyond links and walls of text
The company’s first consumer product, Heywa, is now live on the App Store in the US, UK, and Canada, and accessible via its website. It serves as the first large-scale demonstration of this new interaction approach.
Instead of presenting paragraphs or blue links, Heywa generates structured, visual stories. These are made up of tappable cards that reorganise and adapt instantly as users interact. Each tap reshapes the experience. Each comparison branches into new possibilities.
The goal is to make exploration feel fluid rather than linear. Whether someone is planning a trip, experimenting with new recipes, starting a fitness routine, tackling DIY projects, or pursuing personal growth, Heywa guides them through structured paths rather than leaving them to scroll endlessly.
Traditional search often forces users to dig through SEO-heavy pages and advertisements. Chat-based tools improve retrieval but struggle when exploration becomes multi-step or comparative. Even early attempts at generative interfaces tend to produce static layouts that do not meaningfully adapt once displayed.
Heywa’s system, by contrast, evolves continuously as intent shifts.
Designed for speed and visual thinking
Speed and clarity sit at the heart of the product. The platform delivers roughly two seconds to first meaningful interaction. From there, it responds in real time as users tap, compare, and branch through options.
It is mobile-first by design, optimised for visual reasoning rather than dense reading. Instead of scanning lengthy explanations, users move through interactive structures that surface relevant comparisons and insights.
Rather than consuming a single answer, people engaged deeply with multiple cards per query, suggesting that interaction, not just information, drives understanding.
Built by search and platform veterans
Heywa Labs is led by a founding team with extensive experience building large-scale consumer platforms. Team members previously held senior product and engineering roles at companies including Google, Snap, and Trainline, working on search, discovery, personalisation, and high-traffic systems used by hundreds of millions worldwide.
Over time, Heywa Labs envisions this adaptive interface layer underpinning a wide range of learning, inspiration, and decision-making experiences across the web.
Its mission is to transform everyday curiosity into understanding and action not by generating answers alone, but by generating experiences.
What is the plan for the next 12 months?
Heywa Labs stated, “The next year is about turning Generative UX into a scalable platform. We’re extending the underlying system so it can generate rich, interactive experiences across different products and use cases. At the same time, we’re growing the consumer experience in both scale and depth, making exploration something people can revisit, build on, and share over time.”
What about diversity statistics?
Regarding the diversity, the company revealed to TFN, “We’re a team of 12, with women represented across engineering, operations, and leadership. We also have strong cultural diversity across the company. As a young company, diversity isn’t something we see as ‘done’, but something we actively build into how we hire and grow.”
“People want information that is structured, visual, and interactive – yet AI interfaces went straight back to walls of text, at the cost of human experience,” said Milena Nikolic, CEO and Co-Founder of Heywa Labs. “The next decade won’t be won by smarter models alone, but by the companies that define how intelligence shows up for humans. Generative UX restores clarity, speed, and delight, especially on mobile, where most of life now happens.”
The system powering Heywa gives a small team extraordinary leverage. “We’re a team of ten building something users say feels more engaging and more delightful than products built by tens of thousands of engineers elsewhere,” said Nikolic. “That’s only possible because we’ve built GenUX from first principles – a system that can generate, adapt, and maintain interactive experiences dynamically. We believe this interface layer will matter far beyond a single application.”
