Watching Figma Grow Up

I’ve been using Figma almost every single day for the past five years. As a product designer, it’s been my main tool for designing interfaces, testing and prototyping ideas, and also for working together with teams in different countries and time zones. When I first started, Figma felt like this new and exciting tool that was promising something fresh. Over time, it didn’t just stay as “the design app,” it grew into a full creative platform where you can basically do everything in one place. The IPO just showed how far it has come, starting at $33 a share, finishing the first day at $115.50, and at one point touching a ~$68 billion valuation.

The Core: Figma Design

But at the heart of it all, the main product is still Figma Design. This is the core product that really changed how teams build digital products. It’s not just a tool you open to draw screens anymore. It’s where whole teams come together to design, review, and iterate. That’s why it became the standard across so many companies. Right now, around 95% of Fortune 500 companies, including most of the S&P 500, use Figma Design for their workflows. That’s not a small number, it shows how deeply it’s embedded in the way big enterprises actually work. And once a tool is so integrated into the daily process of thousands of people, it’s not easy to replace. That kind of adoption is the moat, the safety wall, that gives Figma strength even as competition grows.

Building the Ecosystem

From that strong base, Figma has started adding more products that grow naturally from Design. There’s Buzz for creating marketing assets, Make for building prototypes with AI, Sites for publishing, and Slides for presentations. Each one of these products has its own space with strong competitors: Canva for marketing design, Google Slides for presentations, Squarespace and Webflow for websites, Wix for simple builds, Lovable for prototyping. But the difference is, when you use Figma, all of these are connected. You don’t feel like you’re jumping between tools that don’t talk to each other. Instead, it feels smooth, consistent, and like it was designed to be one system. For teams, this is a big deal it saves time, keeps the design language the same, and makes collaboration easier.

Catalysts

Strong IPO performance: $1.2 billion raised with a 250 % first-day jump.
High-margin growth: Revenue growing ~46–48 % YoY with 88–92 % gross margins.
AI-driven product expansion: Buzz, Make, Sites, Slides, and Draw launched with AI features and deep integration.
Enterprise adoption: 13M+ active users and ~95 % of Fortune 500 companies use Figma.
Regulatory tailwind: Independence preserved after the blocked Adobe acquisition.

Assumptions

AI tools will become central to daily workflows, improving retention.
Cross-product integration will continue to be a major differentiator.
Figma will expand further into marketing, publishing, and collaboration spaces.
The company can sustain high margins while scaling globally.

Risks

Valuation is high; slower growth could cause a sharp correction.
Market downturns could impact share performance regardless of fundamentals.
Competitors with large R&D budgets could match or exceed Figma’s AI offerings.
Enterprise adoption brings pressure to continually ship impactful updates.

Competitor Analysis

Buzz vs Canva: Figma wins on workflow integration and design consistency; Canva remains faster for casual, non-designer use.

Slides vs Google Slides / PowerPoint: Figma Slides offers richer collaborative design features; Google wins on ubiquity and familiarity.

Sites vs Squarespace / Webflow / Wix: Ideal for design-led teams already in Figma. Squarespace/Wix are easier for beginners, Webflow is still stronger for complex builds.

Make vs Lovable / Other prototyping tools: AI prototyping is a standout. Especially because Make works smooth with Figma Design as you can copy/past frames directly into make. Also, you can feed your design system so that the output is using your components. Though niche tools still provide more advanced dev-focused features.

Overall edge: Figma’s ecosystem offers breadth and seamless integration that niche competitors can’t match. Competitors retain advantages in simplicity or depth within their specific categories.

Bear Case

Growth slows faster than expected as competitors like Adobe, Canva, and Webflow match Figma’s AI features and push hard into its customer base. The “all-in-one” edge starts to blur as rival tools integrate better with each other, making switching less painful. Figma still grows, but pricing power weakens, and enterprise deals take longer to close. Investor sentiment shifts from “hyper-growth disruptor” to “good but replaceable SaaS,” which means the market values it more like a mature software company.

Base Case

Figma keeps a healthy lead in product integration and user experience. AI features get fully embedded into design, prototyping, and publishing workflows, making them harder to replace inside large organisations. The newer products like Buzz, Slides, Sites, Make, gain steady traction, but don’t dominate their categories yet. Figma grows at a strong but more sustainable pace, continues expanding its enterprise footprint, and holds on to a premium market multiple without the extreme IPO-day hype.

Bull Case

Everything clicks. AI tools become a moat, not a feature. Figma becomes the default creative platform for product, marketing, and web teams, pulling users from Canva, Google Slides, and Webflow. The ecosystem effect snowballs. Once a company adopts multiple Figma products, leaving becomes too disruptive. Enterprise adoption deepens, brand recognition extends beyond designers, and the company starts to influence the broader creative software market the way Adobe did in the 2000s. Growth stays above expectations, margins expand, and the market keeps pricing it like a category-defining leader.

Figma (FIG): The S&P 500’s Design Standard Turning Into an All-in-One Platform

Shared on25 Aug 25Fair value Increased 248%

Shared on25 Aug 25
Fair value Increased 248%