Latest news with #DylanField
Arabian Post
13-05-2025
- Business
- Arabian Post
Figma Charts Bold Course to Public Markets Amid Tech IPO Uncertainty
Design software company Figma Inc. has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in the United States, selecting Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter. This move positions the San Francisco-based firm as a significant test case for investor appetite in technology listings during a period of market volatility driven by geopolitical tensions and fluctuating economic policies. Figma's decision to proceed with an IPO follows the collapse of a proposed $20 billion acquisition by Adobe Inc. in December 2023, which was abandoned due to antitrust concerns raised by regulators in the European Union and the United Kingdom. The termination of the deal included a $1 billion reverse termination fee paid by Adobe to Figma. In April 2025, Figma confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission , signaling its intent to go public. While the company has not disclosed the number of shares to be offered or the anticipated price range, it was valued at $12.5 billion in a secondary share sale in 2024. This valuation was supported by investments from firms such as Fidelity, Franklin Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. Founded in 2012 by Dylan Field, Figma has developed a cloud-based design platform that enables real-time collaboration among users. Its tools are widely used for designing and testing digital products, with a client base that includes major companies like Google, Uber, Spotify, and Adobe itself. The platform's emphasis on accessibility and collaborative features has distinguished it in the competitive design software market. Figma's financial health appears robust, with reports indicating that the company is cash-flow positive. It has also expanded its offerings to include artificial intelligence features and enhanced team collaboration tools, aiming to cater to a broader range of users beyond traditional designers. The broader IPO market, particularly for technology firms, has been subdued due to economic uncertainties, including trade policies and tariff-related disruptions. Several high-profile IPOs have been delayed or scaled back in response to these conditions. Despite this, Figma's move to pursue a public listing suggests confidence in its business model and growth prospects. Morgan Stanley's role as the lead underwriter underscores the significance of Figma's IPO. The investment bank's involvement is expected to provide strategic guidance and support as Figma navigates the complexities of going public in a challenging market environment. Figma's journey to this point has included multiple funding rounds, with significant investments from prominent venture capital firms. The company's ability to attract substantial investment and maintain a strong valuation reflects investor confidence in its long-term potential.
The Verge
09-05-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Figma's CEO on his new approach to AI
Tech event season is in full swing. This week, Stripe and Figma gathered thousands of people in downtown San Francisco for their respective conferences. I caught up with Figma CEO Dylan Field after his opening keynote at Config, where he announced the most significant product expansion in the company's history. Below, you'll find our chat about how he sees AI fitting into Figma after a rough start to integrating the technology last year, the new areas he's targeting to grow the platform, and more. And keep reading for how Meta is turning up the heat on its AI team, my thoughts about this week's OpenAI news, and more… 'Design and craft are the differentiator' These days, it seems like Figma has the entire creative software industry in its sights. On Wednesday, CEO Dylan Field walked onstage in front of about 8,000 people at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to announce four new products: a ChatGPT-like prototyping tool, a website builder and hosting platform, an AI-branded ad tool that's similar to Canva, and an Adobe Illustrator competitor. The last time I interviewed Field, he was resetting Figma's internal culture after its $20 billion sale to Adobe was blocked. When we caught up after his keynote this week, I wanted to hear about his approach to expanding Figma's suite of products ahead of its planned IPO (the latter of which he refused to talk about), how his new approach to integrating AI differs from last year's approach that got Figma in trouble, and how he sees the company's new products stacking up against the competition.
Fast Company
09-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Figma's world is growing fast
As recently as 2021, Figma was a one-product company. That product was Figma Design, the dominant tool for creating app and web interfaces. The company's subsequent addition of offerings such as FigJam (whiteboarding) and Figma Slides (presentations) was hardly a frenzied land grab. But the announcements Figma made this week at its Config conference in San Francisco cover so much ground that my impulse was to interpret them as a massive, sprawling new attempt to take on . . . well, almost everybody. Figma Make turns prompts into AI-generated code? Shades of GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and numerous other AI programming tools. Figma Sites provides features for constructing, hosting, and updating websites? Well, that's a content management system, like WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix. Figma Buzz helps companies create marketing assets that retain a degree of consistency, with AI help if desired? Sounds akin to Canva and Adobe's Canva rival, Express. Figma Draw lets people create free-form vector illustrations? So does Adobe's 38-year-old Illustrator. When I asked Figma cofounder and CEO Dylan Field whether the company was indeed trying to compete directly with so many well-established players in multiple categories, he discounted the notion. Instead, he told me, the new products all support its original focus on turning raw concepts into shippable software. 'The Figma journey that we're trying to support users on is going from idea to product,' he told me. 'Everything's truly through that lens.' Still, it would be a mistake to regard Figma's news as NBD. Even if its original product was a design tool, two-thirds of its users aren't designers. They're all the other people inside companies who play roles in product creation, and even if all the company does is address their needs, it will brush up against new rivals. As Field likes to declare, 'Creativity is the new productivity.' Figma might be in as good a position as anyone to spread that vision to additional classes of software. As a business, Figma also has every incentive to think big. It's been almost a year and half since its $20 billion deal to be acquired by Adobe fell apart over antitrust concerns, leaving it as an independent entity pursuing a self-contained vision. Last month, it confidentially filed a draft S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, beginning the process that will eventually lead to it going public. The more optimistic investors are about the company's ability to keep growing, the better its IPO will fare. (Figma Design's ubiquity as a UX design tool is manifestly obvious—90% of designers who responded to a 2023 survey said they used it—but as a private company, Figma is secretive about hard numbers relating to its business. It does say that 85% of users are outside the U.S., proving that it's a global phenomenon. But the last time it talked about financial return was in September 2022, as part of the Adobe deal announcement. Back then, it said that it expected to do $400 million in revenue that year, with a gross profit of 90%. More current information will come out as part of the IPO process.) As Figma has decided which new products it might build, it hasn't had to look far. Like Excel and Photoshop, Figma Design is the kind of tool that people grow comfortable with and call into service for jobs well beyond its theoretical mandate. Rather than turn it into too much of a kitchen sink, the company has tended to spin out tasks into new purpose-built apps. All of them have a familial resemblance and work together as a suite. The centrality of Figma Design does serve to set the company's latest products apart from others in the same general zip code. Maybe Figma Buzz will win some hearts based purely on its quality. But it seems even more likely that people will pick it over Canva or Adobe Express because it's optimized to serve workflows that are already Figma-centric. 'It's very easy to be able to push a template from Figma Design to the Buzz surface,' Field says. 'And then people know exactly what they can edit. They can go edit it, insert images, or go find a different template if they so choose, and know that they're on brand. Or they can go off the rails if they want to.' Then there's AI, which was already in the air at Config 2023. At last year's conference, the company announced a design-generating feature called Make Designs, which—like AI rollouts all over the tech industry —got off to a bumpy start. After controversy ignited on Twitter over the eerie similarities between a weather app it designed and the one Apple ships on the iPhone, Figma pulled back the feature and reworked it. Even now, designers are still puzzling out how they feel about AI. In a new study commissioned by Figma, only 31% said they currently use the technology for their core work, 69% were satisfied with it, and 54% thought it improved quality. All those figures were notably lower than ones reported in the same study by developers. Uncertainty over AI might be a sign the killer apps haven't arrived. 'People value efficiency,' Field says. 'And so where we can help there, that's really important. But also, they really value raising the ceiling and making it so they're able to do better work. And I think that's where AI has not yet had the impact it should.' Customer feedback might help explain Figma's careful positioning of its new AI features. The company says some organizations may ship products created by Make, which lets users start with something they've roughed out in Figma Design and then use prompts to generate code. Mostly, though, it's emphasizing the potential to quickly turn flat designs into rich prototypes that help push progress along. Another application: adding a dash of custom interactivity to websites powered by Figma Sites. AI is also present in both Figma Design and Figma Buzz in the form of image generation features based on OpenAI's latest GPT-Image-1 model. But when I spoke with Field, he seemed less excited by the prospect of turning over image creation to a machine than by Figma Draw, a classical sort of illustration tool for people who want to hand-create imagery that's precise, reflects a distinctive style, and may even mimic work done with old-school art implements such as a paintbrush. If Draw has any AI at all, it didn't matter enough to merit a mention in the blog post introducing the product. 'We have a lot of opportunity to build tools for folks [to] be more divergent and have more craft and stand out,' Field told me. 'And we think that's the differentiator that'll make people win over time.' As some organizations lean too heavily on AI, we're going to see more and more bland, look-alike products. It's nice to think that doubling down on unmistakably human creativity could be a competitive advantage. And that Figma won't stray too far from its traditional emphasis on helping create such work, even as it figures out how to make AI make sense.
CNBC
07-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Figma introduces 'vibe-coding' AI software design feature
From left, Steven Levy, Wired editor at large, and Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, speak onstage at Wired's The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Dec. 3, 2024. Design software startup Figma on Wednesday debuted an artificial intelligence feature to automate the process of building websites and applications. The new feature, called Figma Make, is the company's response to the rise of "vibe-coding" tools, which turn a short written description into the source code necessary for a website. Google and Microsoft have both touted their own "vibe-coding" tools this year. OpenAI has also entered the space, holding acquisition talks with one startup in the space, Windsurf, and reaching out to another called Cursor on multiple occasions, CNBC reported. The move might draw additional business to Figma, which confidentially filed for an initial public offering last month. Many of today's "vibe-coding" products offer a free tier for light use before requesting payment. Figma Make will only be available to those with full seats that start at $16 per person per month when purchased annually. The company is beta-testing the feature with those users. People with premium subscriptions likely work for companies that store font sizes, color combinations and other design assets in Figma. Over time, the new feature will be able to create designs that adhere to those design systems. Figma's new tool relies on Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI model. For those who don't want to start from scratch, Figma Make can alternatively accept Figma design files as an input and generate code that approximates them. Third-party products such as Vercel's v0 and StackBlitz's offer similar capability but can't inherit existing design systems. Like many other "vibe-coding" programs, Figma Make presents a chat box to ask for and receive adjustments of drafts it comes up with. But sometimes a simple fix such as a font change is all that's necessary. Drop-down menus for specific elements allow for quick alterations, meaning that there's no need to consult the AI model again and wait for a response. Customers who received early access to Figma Make got it to craft video games, a note-taking app and a personalized calendar, a spokesperson said. That doesn't mean there's no place for designers inside companies with the advent of AI. "The more time has gone on, the more that I'm confident in a designer's role — and believe that it's going to be one of the critical roles in bulding software in the future," Dylan Field, Figma's co-founder and CEO, said in conversation recently with Garry Tan, president and CEO of Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator. Also on Wednesday, Figma said it was beginning to test Figma Sites, another feature that requires full seats. It can convert designs into working websites. Support for AI code generation will follow in the next few weeks, Figma said. WATCH: The rise of AI 'vibe coding'
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Figma sent a cease-and-desist letter to Lovable over the term 'Dev Mode'
We may be witnessing the makings of a new tech industry feud between competitors. Figma has sent a cease-and-desist letter to popular no-code AI startup Lovable, Figma confirmed to TechCrunch. The letter tells Lovable to stop using the term 'Dev Mode" for a new product feature. Figma, which also has a feature called Dev Mode, successfully trademarked that term last year, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. What's wild is that 'dev mode' is a common term used in many products that cater to software programmers. It's like an edit mode. Software products from giant companies like Apple's iOS, Google's Chrome, Microsoft's Xbox have features formally called 'developer mode' that then get nicknamed 'dev mode' in reference materials. Even 'dev mode' itself is commonly used. For instance Atlassian used it in products that pre-date Figma's copyright by years. And it's a common feature name in countless open source software projects. Figma tells TechCrunch that its trademark refers only to the shortcut 'Dev Mode' – not the full term 'developer mode.' Still, it's a bit like trademarking the term 'bug' to refer to 'debugging.' Since Figma wants to own the term, it has little choice but send cease-and-desist letters. (The letter, as many on X pointed out, was very polite, too.) If Figma doesn't defend the term, it could be absorbed as a generic term and the trademarked becomes unenforceable. Some on the internet argue that this term is already generic, should never have been allowed to be trademarked, and say Lovable should fight. (Loveable has not yet responded to our request for comment about that.) However, taking on an international legal battle might be pricey for the early-stage Swedish startup. For Lovable, which raised a $15 million seed round in February, changing the feature name to "developer mode' or some other term would certainly be a less expensive option. What's more interesting is that Lovable is one of the rising stars of so-called 'vibe coding.' That's where users can describe what they want in a text prompt and the product builds it – complete with code. Its 'dev mode' feature was launched a few weeks ago to allow users to edit that code. Lovable advertises itself as a competitor to Figma, declaring on its homepage that designers can use Lovable 'without tedious prototyping work in tools like Figma.' And many newly launched startups are doing just that. So this isn't just a trademark dispute. It is also a bigger competitor cracking its knuckles at a pesky upstart. Figma was valued at $12.5 billion about a year ago. A Figma spokesperson almost admits as much. The person told TechCrunch that Figma has not sent cease-and-desist letters to other tech companies like Microsoft when their products are 'in a different category of goods and services.' As for the overall threat of vibe coding products, in a conversation last month with Y Combinator's Garry Tan, Figma co-founder CEO Dylan Field naturally pooh-poohed the idea. Field said that even though people like vibe coding for its speed, 'you also want to give people a way to not just get started and prototype rapidly but also get to the finish line. That's where the disconnect is, and not just for design, but also for code.' As for Lovable, co-founder Anton Osika also seem unconcerned about the letter from a competitor's lawyer. When he shared a copy of it on X, he used the grinning emoji. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Sign in to access your portfolio
