MarketsJul 2, 2025
Figma Was Almost Bought By Adobe for $20B — It’s About To Find Out What It’s Really Worth on Wall Street
Public Debut
Noah Weidner
Discover
In 2023, design software giant Adobe had a new ideological enemy — a quaint upstart called Figma was running circles around the newest member of its Creative Suite lineup, UI/UX tool XD.
Threatening to cause upheaval with its collaborative features and cheaper pricing, Adobe chose to do what all market leaders do when they lack; it spent… or tried to, rather. With $20B at the negotiating table and a deal done in all but name, regulators swooped in.
They forced Adobe to abandon the acquisition, hand a $1B breakup fee to its biggest competitive threat, and turn it loose. That firm is now eying Wall Street.
fIPOgma: Figma is now a step closer to going public after revealing its S-1. It might be one of the prettier, more readable, and better-designed filings the SEC has had the glory of entering into the register, but what investors seek is more than a pretty picture. They want the cold, hard numbers. It was already known that Figma had become something of a golden standard for digital design — 95% of Fortune 500 companies and 78% of Forbes 2000 businesses use its products — but its financials show how integral great design has become to business.
Seeking to raise $1.5B in its highly anticipated IPO, Figma could be on track to surpass AI data center titan CoreWeave for the largest public offering of the year. But looming in CoreWeave’s shadow is Figma’s biggest risk — AI.
Worth the hype? Figma has the opportunity to stand out as a profitable, fast-growing tech firm — especially if it can arrest line-items like its $300K/day cloud hosting tab at Amazon Web Services. New avenues for expansion could challenge the dominance of competitors. Ultimately, it’s the kind of firm that excites both retail investors and institutions, boosting the odds that its valuation could soar past the $20B offer its largest competitor thought would take it off the board.
