Yesterday, the New York Stock Exchange opened its trading session to Figma Inc and declared, “Design is going public today,”. Twenty years ago, design was often viewed as surface-level polish. A decade ago, it was described as “how it works.” In 2025, it was said by Field that design is now how companies win or lose. And today “Design is everyone’s business.” The San Francisco-based company had just pulled off one of the most remarkable IPO debuts in recent memory. Shares opened at $85, more than two and a half times its $33 offering price, and closed at $115.50. With a fully diluted valuation north of $65 billion, the market gave a clear verdict: staying independent was the right move.
Three years ago, Figma was preparing to sell itself to Adobe for $20 billion. That deal collapsed in December 2023 under antitrust pressure from regulators in the EU, UK, and U.S. At the time, it looked like a missed opportunity. But the market debut on Thursday suggested otherwise. “We’ve been focused on this path for years,” Field said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “Honestly, the Adobe situation feels like a long time ago now.”
The $1.2 billion IPO ranks as the largest U.S. tech listing by amount raised since 2021 and the biggest first-day pop for a billion-dollar-plus deal in more than three decades, according to Bloomberg. Figma’s shares were 40 times oversubscribed, with over half the institutional orders receiving no allocation at all. The demand mirrored the recent debut of Circle Internet Group, which saw a 168% jump on day one. But Figma’s 250% surge was in a league of its own.
