Figma's stock opened at $85 on its first day, more than two and a half times its offer price. Two years earlier, Adobe had agreed to buy the company for $20 billion, and regulators had killed the deal. Figma ran in a web browser, so a whole team could work on one design at once, the way people edit a Google Doc. By 2025 it had more than 13 million monthly users, and two-thirds of them were not designers.

Two Students From Brown

Dylan Field and Evan Wallace met as computer science students at Brown University. Field left school as a Thiel Fellow, and they founded Figma in 2012. They tried ideas such as drone software and a meme maker before they settled on a graphics editor that lived in the browser. The bet was that design should be shared work. Wallace built the fast graphics engine that made it possible. Teams at companies like Uber, Netflix, and Airbnb came to build their apps in it.

A Billion-Dollar Breakup

Adobe agreed in September 2022 to buy Figma for about $20 billion. European and British regulators objected, and in December 2023 the two companies called it off. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion breakup fee. Figma then went public on its own. It priced at $33 on July 30, 2025, and closed its first day on the New York Stock Exchange up 250 percent. By June 2026 the shares had fallen below $20. Figma still trades on the NYSE under FIG.

Cover: Figure Study in Colors, James McNeill Whistler. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a figure study in colors.