Less than two years after agreeing to call off plans for a megadeal with Adobe, Figma has filed IPO paperwork and could embrace Wall Street in its own right
Figma makes design software that lets teams collaborate.
Not too long ago, Adobe Inc. tried to acquire Figma Inc. for about $20 billion before regulators pushed back. Now investors will get a chance to own a piece of that smaller design-software company.
Figma publicly filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday as it looks toward an initial public offering. The company, led by co-founder Dylan Field, was valued at $12.5 billion last year after completing a tender offer, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
Adobe is best known for creative tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects that let people design files, edit photography, create logos, generate animations and more. That empire helped Adobe achieve a market value of about $166 billion as of Tuesday’s close. Figma makes creative software too, with a slightly different bent. Though the company also has tools for things like drawing, it’s best known for helping businesses design user interfaces.
People interact with plenty of screens and apps each day, and Figma’s software helps companies build out the user experience in a collaborative way. Figma’s prospectus offers an example of the design work behind the scenes that helps a new show appear in someone’s Netflix queue.
Photo: Figma
That sort of business translated to $749 million in total revenue last year, up 48% from a year earlier. While Figma was profitable in 2023 after receiving a termination fee from the scuttled Adobe deal, it posted a $732 million net loss in 2024 before recording a profitable March quarter of 2025.
The company has 13 million monthly active users and counts nearly all Fortune 500 companies as Figma customers, according to the IPO prospectus.
“Figma has been fortunate to play a part in, and benefit from, the growing global movement to elevate design and the craft of building software,” the company said in the IPO materials.
When Adobe first announced its plans to acquire Figma for about $20 billion in September 2022, some investors were taken aback by the acquisition price. One analyst told MarketWatch at the time that Adobe was used to having a chokehold on the creative-software market but had seen newer services like Figma and Canva gain traction with younger users. Some thought the sticker price hinted at fears within Adobe about the competitive landscape.
Regulators, meanwhile, questioned whether the proposed deal would stifle competition. “In particular, the transaction threatens to significantly affect competition in the market for interactive product design and whiteboarding software,” the European Commission said in February 2023 after announcing it would “assess” the deal.
In the end, the companies decided to walk away from their merger plans. “It’s not the outcome we had hoped for, but despite thousands of hours spent with regulators around the world detailing differences between our businesses, our products, and the markets we serve, we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal,” Figma said in a blog post near the end of 2023. Adobe ended up having to pay a $1 billion termination fee.
Adobe’s stock hasn’t had an easy go of it since the companies called off the combination. Shares of Adobe are off more than 30% since mid-December 2023, while the S&P 500 is up more than 30% in that time. While Adobe offers artificial-intelligence tools, it hasn’t quite been able to convince Wall Street of the financial potential of them.
Figma plays into AI as well, with features that let people erase backgrounds from images, rename design layers or quickly move from an empty canvas to “editable user interfaces.”
“We believe AI is fundamentally transforming the product development process by making it possible for anyone to quickly turn an idea into a functional prototype, or in some cases, a working product,” the company said in its prospectus.
At the same time, AI spending could be “a drag on our efficiency for several years,” Field acknowledged in a letter that was included in the prospectus.
Figma also announced Tuesday that it was adding Bill McDermott, the chief executive of software powerhouse ServiceNow Inc., to its board of directors.
The company intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “FIG.”
