In the months leading up to its long-anticipated IPO, Figma is leaning heavily into AI. The company’s newest release, Figma Make, moves its platform further into the realm of AI-assisted software development, letting users generate app prototypes from text prompts. It’s a milestone release for Figma. Yet the move comes amid intensifying pressure from a new class of competitors born directly from the AI era, prominently: Lovable, a Swedish startup that has grown quickly by offering a similar text-to-interface experience.
As Figma’s AI tools exit beta and its S-1 circulates on Wall Street, the company faces a balancing act: defending its lead while adapting to a technology stack being redefined by generative interfaces.
AI Integration Deepens, but Workflow Gaps Remain
Figma’s IPO filing revealed a company with strong fundamentals. It generated $749 million in revenue in 2024, up 48% year-over-year, and turned profitable again in early 2025 with $44.9 million in net income for Q1. It counts 13 million monthly active users and penetration across 95% of the Fortune 500. CEO Dylan Field, who retains 75% voting control post-IPO, called AI the company’s biggest near-term investment priority.
With the release of Figma Make, Figma now lets users create working apps from prompts, with an option to upload images or design references for more accurate generation. Users can iterate on font styles and layout through conversational input. But some limitations remain. The generated content can’t yet be imported seamlessly back into Figma’s main design tool, limiting its integration in real production workflows. That disconnect has already drawn criticism from some early users.
Figma is also launching a new AI credit system and paywalling some features based on subscription tiers. While the base functionality of Make is now open to all users, the ability to publish or integrate those builds remains gated behind a Full Seat plan.
The launch builds on a series of AI-focused product updates, including Dev Mode, which bridges the gap between design and code, and Figma Sites, which turns mockups into functional websites. Taken together, the roadmap represents a pivot toward automated workflows at a time when design-to-code transitions are becoming increasingly mediated by AI agents.
A Legal Dispute That Signals a Larger Rivalry
While Figma is expanding its AI offering, its most visible competitor has taken a different route. Lovable, launched just over a year ago, has grown rapidly with its “vibe coding” approach, letting users generate full designs and app structures via natural language, with minimal reliance on traditional design tools. It reached $75 million in ARR and over 30,000 paying users, and recently raised $150 million at a $1.8 billion valuation.
Figma and Lovable’s rivalry intensified this spring when Figma issued a cease-and-desist to Lovable over the use of the phrase “Dev Mode,” which Figma had successfully trademarked in 2023. The term is widely used across the software industry, by platforms like iOS and Chrome, and many in the developer community questioned whether the enforcement was warranted. Figma argued it needed to protect its IP. Lovable’s CEO, Anton Osika, dismissed the warning and publicly ridiculed the move, signaling the company’s readiness to challenge Figma’s position, both legally and in the market.
The trademark dispute points to a deeper clash between legacy-first and AI-native approaches. Figma, despite its collaborative and cloud-native roots, is still a platform optimized for professionals and structured workflows. Lovable, by contrast, emphasizes speed, access, and natural language creation. Its interface is centered on output, not iteration. Osika has said Lovable is successfully winning over customers from traditional tools, including Figma, arguing that products built before large language models are increasingly unfit for purpose.
As more tools use AI to remove technical barriers, the core assumptions of software design: about who designs, how, and for what kind of output, are changing. Figma’s challenge is not just to match AI functionality, but to make those features work seamlessly within its existing ecosystem of power users, large teams, and institutional customers. Integrating AI is not the same as building around it.
Field, for his part, has downplayed the threat. In a public interview, he suggested that rapid prototyping tools like vibe coding can’t yet take projects to completion, saying, “you also want to give people a way to not just get started and prototype rapidly but also get to the finish line.”
That’s the bet Figma is making: that scale, brand, and existing enterprise adoption will give it room to evolve at pace, even if the frontier is moving fast. Whether that’s enough to hold off AI-native challengers remains to be seen, but with the IPO looming and Figma Make now live, the company has little room for error.
