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Now valued at an estimated $2bn after its latest funding round, Figma plans to invest in creating new visual communication tools for users.
On Thursday (30 April), Figma CEO Dylan Field announced that the start-up has raised $50m in Series D funding. The round was led by Peter Levine and Marc Andreessen at Andreessen Horowitz.
Existing investors returned to Figma’s Series D round, with Index Ventures, Greylock, KPCB, Sequoia and the Founders Fund participating, as well as Henry Ellenbogen from Durable Capital and a number of angel investors.
Figma, which was launched in San Francisco in 2015, is a cloud-based tool for collaborative interface design. To date, the company has raised $132.9m in funding. Speaking to TechCrunch, Field said that although the company is not yet profitable, the latest round of funding gives the company three to four years of runway.
In a blogpost, Field said that customers have found entirely new uses for Figma over the years, including visual whiteboarding, diagramming, slide creation, city building and Minecraft skin creation.
The funding
With the latest round of funding, the start-up wants to build on its core design and prototyping platform to ensure that Figma is “the most powerful and reliable” platform for team collaboration.
Field said: “We will also explore new ways to serve our global community – designers and non-designers alike – by building dedicated products for an expanded set of use cases around visual communication and creativity.”
The CEO added that he’s “thankful” to be able to accelerate the company’s operations during the difficult global circumstances caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking with Forbes, Field said that the lines between work and home are becoming blurred, which has created “a bit of an acceleration point” for the business, with some users logging in six or seven days a week now.
According to Forbes, the business set up by Field and Evan Wallace is now valued at $2bn. Prior to the Series D, it was valued at $440m.
Field told the publication that in the coming years, Figma will now be pushing into the area of “visual communication”, so that it is a collaborative meeting space for visual projects, rather than just the place where visuals are made.
