By all outward appearances, Figma is no longer just a design tool. At this year’s Config conference in San Francisco, CEO Dylan Field took the stage at the Moscone Center and introduced four new products: Figma Make, an AI-powered prototyping tool; Figma Sites, a website creation and hosting platform; Figma Buzz, an asset generator for marketing teams; and Figma Draw, a vector illustration editor. Each addresses a different phase of digital product development. Collectively, they suggest Figma is building an end-to-end workflow suite for everyone involved in making software.
It’s an expansion that tracks with the company’s trajectory since its $20 billion acquisition by Adobe was blocked in 2022. Left to chart its own course, Figma has filed for an IPO and is growing beyond its single-product roots. For a company once admired for its focus, branching out now feels more like a necessity than a shift in strategy.
Figma’s renewed approach to AI arrives on the heels of a difficult chapter. Last year, the company introduced a feature called “Make Designs” that drew criticism for producing results strikingly similar to existing apps, most notably, a weather app nearly identical to Apple’s. Questions about how the models were trained led to the feature being pulled.
