Figma was born of a technical breakthrough that leveraged WebGL to deliver powerful graphical capabilities in the browser; the browser made Figma collaborative, what I call the operating system of design. Figma has had a fascinating road: the company accepted an acquisition offer from Adobe in 2022, but due to regulatory resistence the latter was forced to abandon the merger in late 2023. Figma instead IPO'd in 2025, and after skyrocketing to a valuation of $56.3 billion, has since crashed to a market cap of less than $10 billion, less than half of Adobe's offer, thanks in large part to a market narrative that the company is an AI loser.
