Dylan Field and the design tool Adobe couldn't buy

In September 2022, Adobe announced that it would acquire Figma for $20B in cash and stock. At the time, it was the largest acquisition of a private software company in history. Fifteen months later, in December 2023, the deal was dead. The European Commission and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority had both signaled they would block it. Adobe walked, paid the $1B termination fee, and Figma found itself, abruptly, an independent company again — with a CEO who had spent the previous year and a half running an integration plan that was suddenly worthless.

Two years later, Figma filed for an IPO. The independent path turned out to be the higher-variance outcome. It also turned out to be more valuable. The market's read on Figma in 2025 was, by every public number, larger than what Adobe had been willing to pay in 2022.

The founder

Dylan Field grew up in Penngrove, a small town in Sonoma County. He went to UPenn to study computer science and math. In 2012, three years before he would have graduated, Peter Thiel's foundation awarded him a $100,000 grant to drop out and build something. He took it.

The cofounder was Evan Wallace, a graphics researcher Field had met during an internship at Flipboard. Wallace's specialty was the kind of low-level WebGL work that most graduate students were doing as a side project — but his side projects looked like things you would expect a small company to be charging for. The bet the two of them made was that a serious vector graphics tool could be built to run in a browser, using WebGL, performant enough that designers would prefer it to native software. Almost every contemporary designer who saw early Figma told them this was technically impossible.

They spent the next four years proving it was not.

The slow launch

Figma went into closed beta in 2015 and launched publicly in September 2016. The first reactions were a mixture of admiration for the engineering and skepticism about the use case. Sketch was the dominant tool. Adobe Illustrator had been the industry standard for two decades. Why would a designer move?

The answer, when it came, was not technical. It was social. Figma's multiplayer feature — multiple designers editing the same file simultaneously, with their cursors visible to each other — was the unlock that made teams switch. The technical achievement was the browser engine; the product achievement was treating design as a multiplayer activity by default. Field has been explicit, in interviews since, that multiplayer was never a feature in his head — it was the primitive that the rest of the product had to support.

The first wave of adoption

The first three years after launch were a slow drip. Design teams at startups switched first, usually because their distributed teams could not use Sketch comfortably across geographies. Then design organizations inside larger software companies — first Microsoft, then GitHub, then a long roster of public-company design orgs — moved their workflows over. By 2020, Figma had become the default for most teams that were building software with more than two designers.

The pandemic was, in retrospect, the inflection. With every design team forced to work remotely overnight, the multiplayer browser tool went from a preference to a necessity. Figma's revenue accelerated through 2020 and 2021. The product line expanded into FigJam, a whiteboarding tool released in 2021, which gave Figma a foothold in the brainstorming and discovery surfaces that Miro had owned.

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Multiplayer is the primitive, not the feature. Once design teams ran one collaborative editing session, they didn't go back.

The Adobe deal

On September 15, 2022, Adobe announced an agreement to acquire Figma for $20B. The split was roughly half cash, half stock. For Adobe, the deal was a defensive move — Figma had become, by then, the design tool inside most of the customers Adobe had spent a decade trying to lock into Creative Cloud. For Figma, the deal was a generational outcome for the cap table.

The reaction from the design community was immediate and hostile. The dominant fear was that Adobe would do to Figma what it had done to other acquired tools — let them stagnate, fold them into Creative Cloud, and let the price creep. Adobe's stated plan was to keep Figma independent post-acquisition, but every designer who had watched Adobe acquire and then absorb Macromedia (in 2005, for what was then a record price of $3.4B) heard the same plan.

What killed the deal was regulators, not designers. The European Commission's investigation, launched in August 2023, concluded that the merger would substantially reduce competition. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority arrived at a similar conclusion. By December 2023, with both regulators signaling formal block, Adobe abandoned the deal. The $1B termination fee — which had been agreed up front as protection for Figma in case the deal fell through — was paid.

The post-Adobe operating posture

What Field has said publicly, in the period after the deal collapsed, is that the company kept shipping as if the acquisition would never close. That operating discipline turned out to matter enormously. The fifteen-month integration period had been long enough that a less disciplined company would have started to coast — slowing releases, holding back hiring, letting senior people drift. Figma did none of those.

The product line in the two years since has expanded along the same trajectory Figma was on before Adobe walked in. Dev Mode launched in 2023 as a developer-handoff surface. Figma Slides launched in 2024 as a presentation tool. Figma Make, announced at the 2025 Config conference, moved the company into AI-assisted design generation — the surface where every design tool now has to either compete or be commoditized.

The IPO

Figma filed for IPO in 2025. Press reports through the year placed annualized recurring revenue above $700M and rising; the public valuation at filing was, by every credible number, well above the $20B Adobe had agreed to pay in 2022. The market's read was that Figma had compounded faster as an independent company than it would have inside Adobe — which is the read Field had been making, quietly, for the eighteen months since the deal collapsed.

The IPO pricing also functioned as a kind of public benchmark for the SaaS market more broadly. Coming after a sustained two-year drought in software IPOs, Figma's listing was the data point investors had been waiting for. The market's response — strong demand, post-IPO trading above the offer price — was read as a signal that the broader SaaS-IPO window was open again.

What founders are watching

The Figma story has become a teaching case in three different ways.

The first is technical depth. The four-year WebGL engine bet is the kind of investment most startups can't afford to make and most product teams would never approve. It paid off because no acquirer or competitor could close the gap inside a normal product cycle. Founders are now actively looking for analogous bets — areas where four years of compounding engineering investment produces a moat that's structurally hard to copy.

The second is social primitives. Multiplayer worked at Figma because design is fundamentally a social activity, and the existing tools had treated it as a single-player one. The lesson generalizes badly — multiplayer in the wrong workflow is just a feature — but the question of which workflow is secretly social, and therefore vulnerable to a multiplayer rewrite, is now standard reading inside every consumer-tooling startup.

The third is regulatory exposure. The Figma-Adobe collapse made it clear that the FTC, EC, and CMA are now active blockers of large software M&A. Founders raising into the high single-digit billions are now planning for a longer independent path than they would have in 2021, because the assumption that a strategic exit will be approved has gotten meaningfully weaker. The Figma outcome — independent, IPO'd, valued above the deal that was killed — is now the model.

Quick takeaways

• The browser-WebGL engine was the four-year technical bet that built Figma's moat — competitors would have had to rewrite their rendering layer to catch up.

• Multiplayer was the primitive that made design teams switch, not a feature.

• Adobe's $20B all-cash deal was killed by EU and UK regulators in December 2023, with a $1B termination fee paid.

• Figma kept shipping product as if the acquisition would never close — which became the operating discipline that compounded the company past Adobe's price.

• The 2025 IPO priced above the abandoned acquisition value, making Figma the post-deal-collapse case study every venture-backed founder now studies.

FAQ

Who is Dylan Field?

Co-founder and CEO of Figma. Thiel Fellow (2012), dropped out of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania to start the company with Evan Wallace. CEO since founding in 2012.

What is Figma?

A browser-based collaborative design tool. Multiplayer editing — multiple designers in the same file at the same time — is the defining feature. Adjacent products include FigJam (whiteboarding), Dev Mode (developer handoff), Figma Slides (presentations), and Figma Make (AI-assisted design generation).

What happened with the Adobe acquisition?

Adobe announced a $20B acquisition agreement in September 2022. After EU and UK regulators signaled they would block the deal on competition grounds, Adobe abandoned the agreement in December 2023 and paid Figma a $1B termination fee.

When did Figma go public?

Figma filed for IPO in 2025; press reports through the year placed annualized recurring revenue above $700M and the IPO valuation above the price Adobe had agreed to pay in 2022.