Adobe announced today its intent to buy startup Figma – a leading web-first collaborative design platform, for approximately $20 billion in cash and stock.
Announcing this acquisition on twitter Adobe stated Figma is a rare, generational team. They bet on the browser early and unlocked entirely new ways for people to collaborate.
The combination of Adobe , a NASDAQ listed company and Figma promises to usher in a new era of collaborative creativity.
Adobe’s mission is to change the world through digital experiences. Today, the digital economy runs on Adobe’s tools and platforms, and throughout its history, the company’s innovations have touched billions of lives across the globe. From revolutionizing imaging and creative expression with Photoshop; to pioneering electronic documents through PDF; to creating the digital marketing category with Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe continues to invent and transform categories.
Figma’s mission is to help teams collaborate visually and make design accessible to all. Founded by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace in 2012, the company pioneered product design on the web. Today, it is making it possible for everyone who designs interactive mobile and web applications to collaborate through multi-player workflows, sophisticated design systems and a rich, extensible developer ecosystem. Figma has attracted a new generation of millions of designers and developers and a loyal student following.
Adobe to carve a new future of collaborative creativity
Together, Adobe and Figma will reimagine the future of creativity and productivity, accelerate creativity on the web, advance product design and inspire global communities of creators, designers and developers. The combined company will have a massive, fast-growing market opportunity and capabilities to drive significant value for customers, shareholders and the industry.
“Adobe’s greatness has been rooted in our ability to create new categories and deliver cutting-edge technologies through organic innovation and inorganic acquisitions,” said Shantanu Narayen, chairman and CEO, Adobe. “The combination of Adobe and Figma is transformational and will accelerate our vision for collaborative creativity.”
They were the first to recognize that product design is so much more than just the tooling: it starts with brainstorming across all stakeholders; it’s inherently multi-player and web-based; and it requires sophisticated design systems and analytical capabilities.
Furthermore, they’ve proven that the browser can be a rich design surface and that a true multi-player user experience can profoundly benefit product designers, product developers and other stakeholders.
According to adobe , both teams bring together amazing expertise in core creative technology and a platform for web-based, collaborative applications. The combination gives us opportunities in three areas that make us better together:
