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Figma has become one of the biggest successes of this year's tech IPOs. After regulators dismantled Adobe’s 2022 $20 billion acquisition offer, analysts were unclear about which road Figma would take. Three years later and a $1.2 billion oversubscribed IPO, Figma is worth a case study.

Its story is a notable success in betting on a growing profession, community obsession, enhancing the profession with tools and resources, and becoming the de facto platform for professionals involved in digital design.

This case study will chart Figma’s origins, unique value propositions, community, growth, fundraising, revenue, IPO, and its future. As usual, please feel free to skip to sections that interest you.

Table of Contents

• Figma Origin and Founding Story

  • Before Figma, there was Adobe and others

  • 3 years to build

• Figma Growth - Community for The Internet Design G …

• Figma’s product roadmap

• Figma vs Others: Competitive Landscape

• Figma Revenue and Traction

• Figma Fundraising

• Adobe’s Acquisition of Figma

• Figma’s IPO - Community Style

• Figma’s Future - Product Development Platform

Figma Origin and Founding Story

Before Figma, Dylan Field was an intern at professional social network LinkedIn and online social news platform Flipboard. He had also worked at Microsoft as a research assistant and as an online marketing intern at technology publisher O’Reilly Media. Evan Wallace, his cofounder, was a WebGL prodigy who had worked as an engineer at Pixar and Microsoft.

Dylan and Evan began working on Figma in 2012 during Dylan’s short time as a computer science student at Brown University. Evan was a student of graphics design and a teaching assistant at Brown’s CS department, while Dylan was the chair of the CS Department’s Undergraduate group. Evan was a talented engineer who was working on complex animated graphics on the web. He also built games and apps.

In September 2012, Dylan was accepted into the prestigious Thiel Fellowship - an initiative by venture capitalist Peter Thiel. The fellowship selects 20 creative and ambitious people each year to drop out of college and turn their ideas into startups. Each recipient receives $100,000 for a year to flesh out their idea fully. Other recipients of the Thiel Fellowship are Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, Shahed Kha, the cofounder of Loom, and Lucy Guo, the cofounder of Scale AI.

Sometime in 2012, Figma’s CEO briefly considered building a meme generator. We thank God he did not do that.

Figma’s vision expanded to build a creative collaborative experience in a web browser. Just like Google had done with Google Docs. It’s important to think about designers and visual design collaboration before Figma.

Before Figma, there was Adobe and others

Before Figma’s creation, design work was conducted on a desktop application and mostly offline. Design teams and their collaborators would share files in different formats and at different versions. As a marketing professional before Figma, it was pretty standard to receive email attachments with filenames such as website_menu_header_reworked_v3.png. I would then review these files, send feedback to the designer, who would rework them and return them to me via email. This was not ideal, and Figma hoped to change that with inspiration from Google Docs.

Google Docs’ online document creator has completely changed how people create documents and collaborate with colleagues. A Google Docs user could create one document and set permissions for colleagues (view only, comment only, view, edit and comment) or even collaborate in real-time with those colleagues. Users could also view version history, returning to previous versions to copy text, images or review documents. This made it easier to work on documents and improve team productivity.

In 2012, Designers used tools like Sketch to make mockups of software applications or design them in high fidelity. These design applications did not work online, and some of them (like Adobe Photoshop) were not intended for software design, lacking buttons and other software elements.

Figma’s core product thesis is to enable real-time collaboration of design between design teams and collaborators who work within the design process. This is a complex problem to solve. Unlike Google Docs, which is text-heavy and can transmit information over the internet fast and in small data formats, design files are high fidelity and beyond that, it is technically challenging to build an in-browser design tool, even without the complexities of real-time collaboration.

Figma calls this collaborative feature Multiplayer - the linchpin of Figma’s product. In a 2017 blog post, Co-founder Evan Wallace said:

The tool would need to load design artefacts, respond to user input, and generate output quickly. With real-time collaboration, the tool would need to transmit design artefacts and assets over the internet to another computer, where they would be received for feedback or changes. Failure to do this means that the design tool isn’t fit for purpose and cannot compete with Adobe’s tools or any other tools in its category.

3 years to build

Because of these technical complexities, Figma spent nearly 4 years developing and releasing its design product in beta. Early team members often took the product to software companies for feedback and evaluation. This is because designers not only care about the tools they use, but also find it disappointing when a tool fails to meet expectations.

With funding from the Thiel Fellowship and a $4 million round led by Index Ventures in 2013, the team continued to build.

Figma launched in private beta in December 2015, along with an announcement of an additional $14M fundraise. Speaking to the press, its founder and CEO, Dylan Field, discussed his aim to be the Adobe for the internet design generation.

Two months before Figma’s announcement, Adobe launched XD to focus on the growing software development industry. However, Adobe failed to launch online collaboration and wouldn’t have this feature until 2019. Dylan Field was right on the mark.

Figma Growth - Community for The Internet Design Generation

How do you market a product in stealth mode for 3 years? Figma’s first marketing hire, Claire Butler and its CEO would pitch Figma to software companies in Palo Alto, California. They would demo the product and receive feedback, using that to refine the product or determine if it was ready to be made public. 

Figma’s growth was slow in its early years. Because it hadn’t solved the technical challenge of making a browser design tool that was collaborative in real-time, it couldn’t go to market. Launching a product that didn’t work would have killed the company on day one. Even after launch, the team got comments like “If this is the future of design, I’m changing careers”. 

However, Figma got one thing right by involving designers in its product development process. Since it was built for designers, it maintained close relationships with them, ensuring their feedback was acknowledged, fixing bugs quickly, and using design leaders to drive attention on launch day. 

In an interview with First Round, Claire Butler talks about the launch approach.

Figma continued to build with designers and adopted a bottom-up approach, drawing on playbooks from companies like Atlassian and Slack. Individual contributors in software organisations often introduced these tools, and because they worked so well, they would invite other colleagues and superiors who would adopt them, leading to paid subscriptions.

Clarity on “the internet design generation” drove Figma’s global expansion. The company inadvertently built an international design movement. From inviting designers to its office in California, it started empowering designers around the world through unofficial meetups.

One example is Dylan Field’s visit to Lagos, Nigeria, in 2018. I recall how upset my colleagues were about missing the meetup, and I felt the same way. I worked at a software development jobs matching platform, and it was nearly unheard of that a high-flying Silicon Valley CEO would randomly pop into dinner in an African city to get user feedback.

These meetups would turn into Friends of Figma, a globally connected community of designers. Friends of Figma meet in literally any city you can think of, and in the company’s IPO filing, it highlights this community’s growth to over 200 groups hosting 650 events in 2024.

Taking community engagement further, Figma created Config - the first of its kind event for Figma designers. The first Config, hosted in 2020, drew 1,000 people from around the world, and by its second iteration, 5,000 attendees were present.

Many startups extend their products with external-facing APIs, SDKs and the like. Figma enables its community to build custom features and workflows via its plug-ins and widget functions. This enables software development talent (designers or developers) to leverage Figma’s platform by creating these custom tools for their colleagues. It also directly involves the design community in the future of Figma’s product.

Figma engages with its community in other ways, hosting Office Hours to showcase new products while receiving feedback from its users

As a result of Figma’s global community efforts, more than 50% of its revenue comes from the US, and about 80% of its users are international. 

Figma’s product roadmap

But Figma is not just for designers. As a growth and product marketing professional, I find myself spending hours in Figma. While I don’t design user interfaces or visual assets, I am involved in processes for refining and testing them. Figma has found that 2-thirds of its user base are non-designers. Its CEO wrote about people like me in his 2017 letter.

Figma’s vision is to enable creative visual collaboration online. Fortunately for the company, visual collaboration doesn’t end with software design. The company is aware of this and has developed a suite of tools to support every step of the design journey, including those involving non-designers, within its product. It is rapidly building features to cover the entire design journey. 

Using the adjacent user theory, Figma uses designers as a lever to pull all collaborators into its products. These collaborators then become users as well. They might interact in Figma Design, use Figma Make or work within Figma Dev. The growth loop continues, attracting new Figma users, who attract other users, who collaborate with existing users and then pay for Figma. By successfully converting adjacent users, Figma directly grows usage and revenue.

Here are some notable product launches from Figma that capture the adjacent user:

1. April 2021: It launched FigJam - a digital whiteboarding tool for whiteboarding, brainstorming and team collaboration. FigJam is a low-fidelity tool for sketches, mockups and low-fidelity design work - used even by non-designers. This was the first time it built a product beyond its primary design tool, Figma Design.

2. June 2023: It launched Dev Mode. Figma Dev Mode is a specialised feature designed to streamline the handoff process by helping developers translate design into code more efficiently. The feature was made generally available in January 2024.

3. June 2024: Figma Slides launched in a public beta. The presentation tool allows users to create and collaborate on slide decks directly within Figma. March 2025: Figma Slides is officially launched and made available to all users.

4. May 2025 (at Config 2025): The company announces a significant expansion of its product suite, positioning itself as an end-to-end platform for digital product development. This feature set includes:

   
   Figma Sites (Open Beta): A website builder that allows designers to publish their designs directly to the web. Figma Sites will soon include a content management system.
   
   Figma Draw: A new vector illustration tool with custom brushes and other features, representing a direct challenge to tools like Adobe Illustrator.
   
   Figma Buzz (Open Beta): A tool for creating marketing content and on-brand assets at scale, positioning the company as a competitor to platforms like Canva.
   
   Figma Make: An AI-driven, prompt-to-code tool that allows users to generate functional prototypes and web apps from their ideas and designs.
   
   Figma AI: New AI features, such as autosuggest text and image editing. With plans to be integrated across all of the company's products.
   
   Grid: A new feature within Auto Layout that makes it easier to create responsive, two-dimensional layouts.

Figma’s product direction has enabled it to take on Adobe. By building tools for general design, web design, illustration and marketing design, Figma shoots directly at Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Its recent roadmap, however, also acquires new competitors like Canva, known for generalist non-designer design, and Webflow, a content management system for websites. Figma also tackles new AI-first design startups such as Lovable, V0, Replit and Base44. Let’s study Figma’s competitive landscape.

Figma vs Others: Competitive Landscape

Figma has spent 9 years broadening its horizons to include everyone involved in any kind of design process. This includes product managers, user experience researchers, developers, marketers, and writers. In its IPO S1 filing, it uses this image to describe its new audiences. All of these professionals can use Figma in their day-to-day work

The diagram below shows that Figma’s competitive landscape is 2-pronged. Designers and non-designers.

Figma Revenue and Traction

As a result of Figma’s customer obsession, community, product and expansion, it has grown successfully from a company with $700,000 in revenue in 2017 to a projected $1 billion in revenue for 2025.

Figma strategically leverages collaboration (its core thesis) to build product offerings that deliver high retention rates but also revenue. As a result of this, it has more than 11,000 business customers who pay over $10,000 annually.

Figma’s product is not just valuable, it’s sticky. Its early customers still use it, and, as shown in the chart below, even its newest paid customers continue to use the product long-term.

Below is a timeline of Figma’s revenue growth from inception to IPO.

• 2017: Figma starts monetising its product with the launch of its "Pro" tier and generates approximately $700,000 in revenue for the year.

• 2018: Revenue grows to $4 million.

• 2019: Figma launches its "Team" plan. Its annual revenue reaches $25 million.

• 2020: Revenue reaches $75 million.

• 2021: Revenue reaches $95 million.

• 2022: Revenue reaches $400 million.

• 2023: Revenue reaches $506.08 million.

• 2024: Revenue grows to $749 million.

• 2025: The number of customers with over $100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) grows to 1,031, representing 37% of the total ARR. Revenue estimates for the year stand at $900 million.
  

Figma Fundraising

Figma’s success is also partly due to successful fundraising efforts and investor backing. In its 13 years preceding its IPO, the company raised a total of $333.1 million from venture capital investors, attracting top firms such as Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins. Before the IPO, it grew to over $740 million in annual recurring revenue. A testament to its product leadership, but also investor confidence in its business.

Adobe’s Acquisition of Figma

In 2022, software maker Adobe announced its intent to acquire Figma for $20 billion to bolster its design software portfolio. Several market regulators around the world investigated and found Adobe’s offer anticompetitive, alleging that the company’s ownership of Figma would reduce competition for design software and scuttle innovation in the design software industry. In December 2023, Adobe terminated its offer and paid Figma a $1 billion break-up fee.

By 2024, Figma was valued at $12.5 billion in a tender offer, with existing investors Sequoia and Andreessen-Horowitz (A16Z) and new funders such as Fidelity and Franklin Venture Partners taking part.

Figma’s IPO - Community Style

In April 2025, Figma files its S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering (IPO). The company initially prices its shares between $25 and $28, targeting a valuation of $14.6 billion to $16.4 billion.

Following its debut on the NYSE as $FIG ( ▲ 0.58% ) , Figma's stock soared, closing at $115.50 on its first day. Its market capitalisation briefly hit nearly $68 billion, with retail investors unable to buy shares.

But there’s something unique about this. Before an IPO date, a company’s CEO would typically visit investment bankers, hedge funds, and other asset management stakeholders to secure buyers for the company's stock. This is called a roadshow. Dylan Field, Figma’s CEO, embarked on a roadshow like no other, ensuring 25 firms bought $850 million worth of stock - about 70% of the deal.

The Information reports that Dylan and other Figma executives scoured through a list of potential buyers to determine who would get access to purchase stock. Figma preferred long-term partners over quick stock flippers, so it ensured speaking to all major investors individually.

From The Information:

Figma once again extended its culture of community engagement to its investors and, more importantly, listened to their needs.

Figma’s Future - Product Development Platform

Figma’s future is a battle with heavily capitalised entrants and incumbents. Newcomers like Lovable and Replit are raising capital and deploying features at an alarming rate while incumbents like Adobe and Canva go after Figma’s audiences.

The company quickly adopted AI in response to the threat from new AI design and development tools. Figma Make, launched to the public in July 2025, is a direct attack on tools like Replit, Lovable, V0, and Base44. Figma Make is also an expansion of the company’s plan to capture more of the non-designer market, and AI could be a tool to achieve this goal.

Prompt-to-design and click-to-prompt features enable non-designers to deliver graphics, interfaces, and visual assets. While these are not professional designers, AI tools allow them to embody design for new formats - in the same way Figma enabled a new generation of software designers when it launched.

Figma’s strength and advantage lie in its platform features, hinged on collaboration, quick product iteration and deployment, community relationships, and a strong user base of 13 million monthly active users. It’s also well capitalised, having just raised $1.2 billion.

In its S1 filing, Figma describes its future as a product development platform:

Figma has captured the heart of digital designers. Now it must capture everyone else’s heart, too.

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