Figma
It Builds the Screens of Google Maps,
Uber, and Netflix.
In September 2022, Adobe signed an agreement to acquire Figma. But with no clear path to regulatory approval, the deal was terminated in December 2023. At that point, Adobe paid Figma a break-up fee of about $1 billion.
Even so, Figma did not stop after Adobe walked away. By 2024 it had grown to $749 million in revenue, with 95% of the Fortune 500 and 78% of the Forbes Global 2000 using it.
On top of that, in 2025 it launched four new products at once: Sites (building websites), Make (coding), Buzz (marketing images), and Draw (illustration). A company in its 13th year shipped four products in a single year.
What the S-1 presents is a company that took a $1 billion break-up fee from a collapsed acquisition and launched four new products.
Ten questions. We lay out only what the S-1 says.
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- Q1What is this company, really?
- Q2What is it competing on?
- Q3How big is the market?
- Q4Who uses it?
- Q5How does it make money?
- Q6Are the numbers healthy?
- Q7Who runs it?
- Q8Who controls it?
- Q9What does it fear?
- Q10What happens to the money raised?
- —Closing: beyond the ten questions
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Question 1
What is this company, really?
Primary source · from the S-1
Prospectus Summary (p.1+), Business (p.154+) — from the S-1
In one line: a company that builds the design software for screens, running inside the browser.
Line up the use cases the S-1 opens with and you get this: the screens of Google Maps, Uber, JetBlue, Netflix, Duolingo, and LinkedIn; the screens of Mercado Libre and Airbnb; the screen you use to ask Claude a question.
Much of the design behind the services you use on your phone every day is made inside one piece of software: Figma.
What is new about it? It runs inside the browser. Earlier design software was the kind you install on a PC (Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and so on). Figma, like Google Docs, lets anyone join the editing simply by opening a URL.
And what came of that? The S-1 records that one early user said this:
In the design industry of the time, the S-1 notes, files were named things like “Draft_Final_V2_FINAL_v13” and passed around as email attachments.
It solved the “which one is the final version” problem through URL sharing.
Question 2
What does it compete on?
Primary source · from the S-1
Business (Competitive Strengths, p.154+) — from the S-1
Figma competes in three distinctive ways.
It runs in the browser (multiplayer editing)
This is the core. Like Google Docs, Figma lets several people edit the same screen at the same time. An engineer can check dimensions right beside the designer drawing the lines.
Technically it uses WebGL (a technology for using the GPU inside the browser). Of its early days, the company recalls that it built, tested, and iterated for three years. Running high-performance graphics in the browser was hard at the time, it says.
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Keep reading
- Q3 How big is the market?
- Q4 Who actually uses it?
- Q5 How does it make money?
- Q6 Are the numbers healthy?
- Q7 Who runs it?
- Q8 Who controls it?
- Q9 What is it afraid of?
- Q10 What becomes of the money it raises?
- Closing Beyond the ten questions