Adobe competitor Figma went public Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange in a debut that saw the price of its first public trade nearly triple from the $33 per share the company and its institutional investors offered it up at, to $85, for a valuation of about $50 billion, well beyond the $20 billion the San Francisco-based design software startup agreed to in 2022 to essentially be acquired by Adobe. That deal was nixed by European regulators, who determined the move would stifle competition. Figma shares closed Thursday at $115.50, for a valuation of $67.7 billion.

“Figma’s offering is ‘a very positive sign’ for other startups that might go public. For investors, it’s definitely encouraging,” Renaissance Capital Director of Research Nick Einhorn told The New York Times.

NYT describes “Figma’s stock ‘pop’ — Wall Street lingo for how much a stock jumps on its first day of trading” — as “an eye-watering 250 percent, far above the midteens percentage rise that companies and their underwriters typically aim for,” going on to describe how Figma’s 33-year-old co-founder and CEO, Dylan Field, a Brown University grad from a modest background, is “the latest tech billionaire, with his stake in Figma worth more than $6.3 billion.”

CNBC interprets Figma’s strong performance as “the latest indication that the tech IPO market has reopened following a multiyear lull that began in early 2022, when inflation was soaring and interest rates were on the rise.” Thus far in 2025 online bank Chime, crypto company Circle and AI infrastructure firm CoreWeave successfully mounted IPOs, while credit firm Klarna and ticketing company StubHub wait in the wings.

“Given the trend of many amazing companies staying private indefinitely, you might be wondering why I have decided to take Figma public in the first place,” Fields writes in a “founder’s letter” on the company blog, citing “obvious benefits such as good corporate hygiene, brand awareness, liquidity, stronger currency and access to capital markets.”

Field says design will evolve as an integral component of AI as it is “integrated into user-facing surfaces,” a role underscored by OpenAI’s multi-billion dollar deal with former Apple design guru Jony Ive in May. “Right now we’re in the MS-DOS era for AI, where the prompt is the interface,” Field writes. “Just like the GUI helped everyday users understand the capabilities of computers, there will be a proliferation of interfaces that surface the capabilities of AI through exceptional design.”

Figma was founded in 2012. Adobe offered to buy it for $20 billion in September 2022, only to terminate the deal in December 2023.

Related:
Figma Is Largest VC-Backed American Tech Company IPO in Years, The Wall Street Journal, 7/31/25
Figma’s Pursuit of Long-Term Backers Kept IPO Price in Check, Bloomberg, 8/4/25
How Figma Integrates AI to Transform Design and Empower Creatives, OpenAI, 8/1/25
Lina Khan Points to Figma IPO as Vindication of M&A Scrutiny, TechCrunch, 8/2/25