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Figma Inc.’s IPO is one of the most talked-about public offerings in tech this year, and its happening today. A few people stand to make a lot of moneyincluding cofounder and CEO Dylan Field, as well as a number of big venture capital investors. Figma, a collaborative design software platform, provides a suite of online design tools for designers to craft user interfaces (UIs) for websites and apps, which are popular with Fortune 500 companies. The tools are used by a host of businesses, from Microsoft to Zoom. Heres a look at how much some of the principal players could take home as the company IPOs. First, how is the Figma IPO going? On Wednesday, Figma Inc. priced the IPO at $33 a share. On Thursday, shares opened at almost triple their initial public offering price on Thursday, at $85 on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE:FIG), which valued the company at about $50 billion. That valuation greatly exceeds a previous $20 billion buyout attempt from Adobe that fell apart in 2023. Trading was halted after shares quickly rose above $112. Figma IPO payout: Field, Wallace biggest winners One of the biggest winners of this listing is Figma’s cofounder, 33-year-old Dylan Field, who is now worth an estimated $1.8 billion, but as Forbes noted, this could be just the beginning of his payout; he could get another $1.3 billion in stock if the stock hits $130 per share. Based on the IPO price, Field’s cofounder Evan Wallace would be worth an estimated $1.3 billion, but he donated a third of his shares to the anti-homeless nonprofit Marin Community Foundation, per Axios. (Wallace left the company in 2021.) Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins sell shares The IPO enables existing shareholders to sell more shares than expected at a higher ratio; and Figmas biggest venture investors are cashing in. Bloomberg reported the company sold 12.47 million shares in the IPO while investors including Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Kleiner Perkins sold 24.46 million shares at a market value of $16.1 billion, based on the outstanding shares listed in its filings. With employee stock options and restricted stock units, the company has a fully diluted value of about $18.5 billion. According to Venture Capital Journal, the biggest winner here would be Index Ventures, which holds 62.57 million shares, which at the opening price of $85, are worth $5.3 billion. The Journal reported that in all, the VCs stand to make more than $6 billion even at conservative estimates. Figma by the numbers As Fast Company previously reported, Figma reported $228.2 million in revenue for the first three months of 2025, according to its SEC filings. The company reported $749 million in revenue in 2024, an increase of 48% year-over-year. The design software maker has 13 million monthly active users.
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Major League Baseball is getting creative to bring new fans into the game. The leagues experimentation will result in a lot of firsts this weekend, with a special game hosted at an iconic NASCAR track in Tennessee. The event, dubbed the MLB Speedway Classic, will mark the first MLB game ever played in the state and its already smashed a league attendance record, topping 85,000 tickets sold. The previous record of 84,587 was set during a 1954 New York Yankees game at Cleveland Stadium. Hosted at a pop-up baseball diamond elaborately built into Bristol Motor Speedway, the game will showcase the Atlanta Braves taking on the Cincinnati Reds on Saturday night. Everything about the event is designed to maximize hype, from a nostalgic first pitch featuring two Hall of Famers to accompanying performances from Tim McGraw, Pitbull and Jake Owen and a flurry of NASCAR-related brand activations. The Bristol game isnt the MLBs first special high profile event designed to open the game to potential new fans. Last year, the league introduced a tribute to Black baseball history with the East-West Classic, which returned last month to Birmingham, Alabamas historic Rickwood Field, former home of Willie Mays and the Negro Leagues Black Barons. The MLB has also rewarded its Japanese fans and tapped into Shohei Ohtani fever by kicking off its regular season with a pair of games between the Dodgers and the Cubs played in Tokyo. The series set records as the most-watched MLB games in Japans history. Once the most popular American sport, baseball has slumped in recent decades. Baseballs fanbase has stagnated compared to the explosive growth of the NFL. Younger viewers are looking beyond traditional sports for entertainment. Well aware of those trends, the MLB is mixing things up to get the sport growing again including playing on converted NASCAR tracks. The league is also testing out robot umpires, giving star players the anime treatment and even changing up the rules altogether. The MLB introduced a set of tweaks over the last few years designed to speed up games. Foremost among them was a shorter pitch timer, but the league also made bases bigger to encourage steal attempts and widened runners lanes. The barrage of small changes was designed to make the famously plodding sport faster and more dynamic, and the experiment seems to be working: Last year, the average duration of an MLB game dropped down to two hours, 36 minutes 28 minutes shorter than the 2022 average, making for the quickest games since 1985. You have to continue to capture the next generation, or it is an existential threat to the sport, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told the Los Angeles Times last year. As much as we love the thought that we are the national pastime, I think resting on your laurels is a really bad business strategy.
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E-Commerce
Figma (FIG) held celebratory festivities out on the cobblestone streets of New York Citys financial district this morning, and rightfully so. Your favorite designers favorite design software company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange today with an initial public offering (IPO) of $98triple its projected price of $33and landing a valuation of $19.3 billion. Last year, Figma rebranded for growth mode. It doubled its core products from four to eight, and launched new AI features to expand its user base and product capabilities to get more people into the productand stay there. Today, those product-led growth decisions delivered in a ten figure payoff. Figma, once squarely focused on professional designers, is now aiming to be the software platform for everyone on a team. The last six years I have been working on this has been focused on the singular mission of going from idea all the way to the final product and [] bringing more people into the process, Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita said while sitting in a quiet conference room in the New York Stock Exchange. It’s been nice to see how design has become something that everyone cares aboutand not just designers. [Photo: Figma] Big products, big demand Figma’s IPO, which as of Thursday was 40 times oversubscribedmeaning demand for shares was 40 times greater than what was availablealso marks the most richly valued enterprise software IPO since 2021, Matthew Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, told Investors Business Daily. Not bad for a company that spent a mere year and a half regrouping from a failed $20 billion acquisition deal with Adobe in late 2023. (Adobes stock dropped 5.5 points today, at time of writing.) Much of that comes down to demand for its software. Figma says it has a total addressable market of $33 billion across the global workforce engaged in software design. Seventy-six percent of customers use two or more Figma products, an indication that cross-functional teams are a core consumer as much as designers at this point. In fact, two-thirds of its 13 million users are non-designers, like writers, marketers, project managers, and developers. And the product is everywhere: Figma claims in its prospectus that 95% of Fortune 500 companies use its software, including Google, Uber, JetBlue, Netflix, Airbnb, and Duolingo. Noting the quantity of non-designers on the platform, Yamashita asked: “How can we do more for them and meet them where they are?” [Image: Figma] A better tool Figma set a new software standard when it launched the multiplayer, in-browser app and web interface design platform called Figma Design in 2012, which provided a low barrier to entry and a super easy way for new users among community-driven professional designers to share their worksimply share a URL. That made it easier for non users to play around, and eventually buy in. [Image: Figma] It subsequently launched FigJam (whiteboarding) and Figma Slides, without much buzz, but this year launched four more products: Figma Make (creates AI-generated code), Figma Sites (creates websites), Figma Buzz (creates marketing assets), and Figma Draw (for making free-form vector illustrations), all of which elbows up against the use cases of a slew of companies: WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Canva, Adobe Express. [Image: Figma] Figma’s goal is to expand on its founding purpose to become a multi-product company for multi-role creative teams. It aims to reach an expanded audience that includes developers (a third of its current user base) and other team members like project managers, who help bring design deliverables to life. Seeing an idea through to launch requires an entire team to go through that process to make the best products, and so we are trying to fill all those different gaps, says Yamashita. If we can welcome more people into te process and actually really go deep into their workflows such that they are relying on Figma every single day, that is a really great place for us to be. [Image: Figma] Among professional designers, the sentiment is that Figma is simply better than everything else on the market. Its the most powerful and complete design tool, says Pentagram partner Andrea Trabucco-Campos. Figma did establish a whole new paradigm that will be around for the foreseeable as the de facto tool for collaboration and design. He also noted the product has its limits, and doesn’t replace InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator. What differentiates Figma from its competitors who are also trying to claw their way to becoming every creative team’s everything app, according Yakashima, is its exclusive focus on the product team. Designers tend to work ahead, he says, referring to how users started created slides in Figma before the actual product existed, and that informs the company’s product decisions. Figma Slides and Figma Make provide easy entry points for non-designers because the tools are already familiar to them, but it brings them into a platform where designers already create sophisticated work, he says. That’s what we want to, you know, really encourage and capitalize on. Considering the hype at NYSE today, investors seem to strongly believe its well-positioned to do that. [Photo: Figma] Figma’s growth plan Now, as the rise of AI is causing distinct roles and longstanding processes within teams collapse, Figma offers a clue to understanding what the future of design software looks like: expansive, holistic, turnkey. Its less about design work specifically, more about workflows. We live in a world now where we have to recognize that the boundaries between roles are blurring, says Yamashita. So rather than saying, ‘hey, it’s just one kind of persona or target audience that is important,’ we have to be focused on the activity that they are doingthat activity is building and designing products. Any software company worth its salt wants to own as much of the work process as it can, soup to nuts, because thats the best way to retain users. Everyone from Adobe to Canva are trying to do this through product extensions. And Figma has plans to rapidly expand its offerings. [Photo: Figma] The company’s growth plan, according to its SEC filing, has five pillars: maintain a rapid pace of product innovation, convert new and existing users into paid (the platform has a freemium model), grow within current customers, extend the platform, and expand its international footprint. You should know that while weve built an efficient business, our primary goal is not efficiency, founder Dylan Field wrote in the filing. Our goal is to achieve long-term growth by supporting the rapidly evolving needs of designers. He adds, Expect us to take big swings when we see a chance to invest in our platform or pursue M&A at scale, referring to mergers and acquisitions. On the product side, that means continuing to rapidly build and launch products that address product teams’ ever-changing workflows. The company also plans to continue investing heavily in AI, which Field described as a possible drag on its efficiency in the short term. As Figma enters public markets, its strategic advantage over competitors is collaboration, says Yamashita. We believe the future of building is one that is collaborative and highly visible, he says… If we can help entire product teams build faster or build better products faster, then I think that is something that is valuable for everyone, right. Valuable for customers, it is valuable for us.”
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