Figma

About

Figma is a collaborative design platform that enables teams to create, prototype, and test digital products in the browser. The company was founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, who met as computer science students at Brown University — Field was a student and Wallace was his teaching assistant ¹. They bonded over WebGL, sensing an opportunity to bring GPU-level performance to the browser ¹.

In 2012, Field received a Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 grant conditioned on leaving school to work on the company full-time ². Field and Wallace moved to San Francisco, where they spent four years building the product before its first public release in 2016 ².

In September 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for $20 billion, but the deal was terminated in December 2023 after regulatory opposition from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority ³. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion reverse termination fee ³.

Figma went public on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2025, pricing its IPO at $33 per share. Shares surged to $115.50 on the first day of trading, briefly pushing Figma’s market capitalization to nearly $68 billion ⁴. The company reported $749 million in revenue for 2024, representing 48% year-over-year growth ⁵.

Funding History

SV Angel is listed as a portfolio investor in Figma at the growth stage ⁹.

What Investors Say

Danny Rimer of Index Ventures led Figma’s seed round in 2013 with a $1.7–$1.8 million investment. Index Ventures’ seed stake ultimately yielded approximately $7 billion at Figma’s IPO valuation — one of the most successful seed investments in venture capital history ¹⁰.

What Founders Say

Dylan Field reflected on building Figma: “If you’re an artist you can just sketch something out and draw it and it’s beautiful, but if I sketch something out I’m not an artist the idea loses a lot of its luster… And so what we’re trying to do is make it so that anyone can be creative by creating free simple creative tools in the browser” ¹¹.

On company building, Field shared: “If you hire smart people, you want to empower them to go do what they do best, and I was not doing a good job of that… It’s kind of meta, but just like you’re building a product for your users, you’re also building the company for your team, and you’re building a culture for the team” ¹¹.

After Figma’s IPO, Field told his team: “Number goes up, number goes down. And we don’t control that number, we control the inputs. And we have to educate the market” ⁵.

Sources