By Mukundan Sivaraj · AIM Media House
Figma has acquired the team behind AI startup Bud, formerly known as Orchids, as the company continues expanding its platform beyond interface design into AI-assisted coding, application development, and autonomous agents. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Bud began as a "vibe coding" platform that enabled users to build applications for web, mobile, Slack, browsers, and other platforms using natural language prompts. The startup later shifted its focus to AI agents capable of accessing external services, browsing the web, writing code, and automating workflows.
As part of the acquisition, Bud announced that both Bud and Orchids will shut down on July 18, giving users until then to migrate their projects. According to the company's announcement , the decision follows the team's move to Figma.
"Figma is one of, if not the, defining product companies of our time to capitalize on this. It's where ideas start, iterate, and come to life, and a natural home for this exciting new era of work," Bud CEO Kevin Lu wrote in a post announcing the acquisition.
Figma did not specify how the Bud team will be integrated into its products. However, the acquisition comes as the company broadens its AI capabilities across design, prototyping, and software development.
Push Into AI-Powered Product Development The acquisition builds on a series of AI initiatives Figma has introduced over the past year.
Earlier this year, the company launched an AI-powered design agent that can generate and edit interfaces directly inside the canvas while also opening the platform to external AI coding agents through Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Those capabilities allow tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex to interact directly with Figma files instead of treating design and development as separate workflows.
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