Figma: The $33 IPO That Tripled Before Lunch
Published November 2, 2026
Design-software company Figma went public on July 31, 2025 at $33 a share, valuing it at $19.3 billion, then closed its first day at $115.50 for a valuation near $70 billion — a windfall for founders, early investors and employees after a $20 billion Adobe takeover collapsed in 2023. Staff who held on through lockups still faced a steep tax bill and a share price that later fell back sharply.
On July 31, 2025, the design-software company Figma debuted on the New York Stock Exchange at thirty-three dollars a share, valuing the business at about 19.3 billion dollars. By the end of that first day of trading, the price had more than tripled, closing at 115.50 dollars and lifting the company's market value to nearly seventy billion dollars. It was one of the most spectacular first days for a technology listing in years, and it turned a long, bruising corporate saga into an overnight fortune for the company's founders, its early backers, and many of its employees.
Figma had earned its following the hard way. Founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, it built a design tool that ran in a web browser, letting whole teams work on the same file at once instead of emailing versions back and forth. By the time it filed to go public, it claimed thirteen million monthly active users and said that ninety-five percent of the Fortune 500 used its products. In 2022, Adobe agreed to buy the company for twenty billion dollars, a deal that would have made its owners rich immediately. Regulators in the United States, Britain, and Europe objected, Adobe walked away, and Figma collected a one-billion-dollar breakup fee instead.
The failed takeover set up an unusual three-act story for employees. First came the Adobe price, twenty billion dollars, dangled and then withdrawn. Then came a 2024 tender offer that valued the company at about 12.5 billion dollars, letting some staff cash in part of their holdings at a lower price. Then came the IPO itself, priced at thirty-three dollars after the company had twice raised its expected range, from twenty-five to twenty-eight dollars and then thirty to thirty-two. Those who sold early took the certain money; those who waited watched their shares more than triple on day one, at least on paper.
Paper wealth, however, is not spendable wealth, and the months after the IPO delivered that lesson in detail. Employees faced a six-month lockup before they could sell most of their shares, and an early lockup expiry on September 5, 2025, sent nearly twelve million shares trading at around fifty-four dollars, less than half the first-day close. The company's prospectus listed more than twenty-three million Class A stock options with an average strike price of 9.77 dollars, and employees who waited until sale to exercise them faced ordinary income tax rates rather than lower long-term capital gains rates, a difference analysts estimated cost staff collectively on the order of one hundred and sixty million dollars in extra tax at that September price.
Figma's own fortunes were real enough underneath the market theatre. Its filing showed a profitable, fast-growing software business with high gross margins, a rarity among newly public tech companies, and its first earnings report as a public company still sent the shares down sharply, a reminder that even strong businesses get repriced violently once they trade daily. For the employees, the story is therefore two stories at once: a genuine windfall built over thirteen years of building a product millions of designers relied on, and a crash course in how much of a paper fortune can evaporate between the opening bell, the lockup expiry, and the tax return.
The lesson: A failed takeover is not the end of a windfall — sometimes the long way round, through an IPO, pays even more, but only for those who can wait out the lockup and the tax bill.
Source: original reporting · How we source stories