Figma, the design platform that lets folks work collaboratively and in the cloud, has today announced the close of a $50 million Series D financing. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with partner Peter Levine and cofounding partner Marc Andreessen managing the deal for the firm. New angel investors, including Henry Ellenbogen from Durable Capital, also participated in the round alongside existing investors Index, Greylock, KPCB, Sequoia and Founders Fund.
Forbes reports that the latest funding round values Figma at $2 billion.
Dylan Field, Figma founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that discussions between a16z and Figma actually began towards the end of the fundraising cycle for the company’s Series C, which closed in February of 2019.
“It felt a bit like a shotgun wedding,” said Field, explaining that both parties instead opted to get to know each other better. They’ve been building their relationship over the past year, leading to today’s Series D close. Field also added that he has not met other investors in this round in person, and the vast majority of the deal was done over Zoom.
“When you think about the future of Silicon Valley, there is an interesting question around capital infrastructure being here and people not being able to access that if they’re not here, too,” said Field. “I got to see firsthand how a deal done online can work and I think more and more investors aren’t going to worry about whether you’re in Silicon Valley or not.”
Figma launched in 2015 after nearly six years of development in stealth. The premise was to create a collaborative, cloud-based design tool that would be the Google Docs of design.
Since, Figma has built out the platform to expand access and usability for individual designers, small firms and giant enterprise companies alike. For example, the company launched plug-ins in 2019, allowing developers to build in their own tools to the app, such as a plug-in for designers to automatically rename and organize their layers as they work (Rename.it) and one that gives users the ability to add placeholder text that they can automatically find and replace later (Content Buddy).
The company also launched an educational platform called Community, which gives designers the ability to share their work and let other users ‘remix’ that design, or simply check out how it was built, layer by layer.
A spokesperson told TechCrunch that this deal was “opportunistic,” and that the company was in a strong cash position pre-financing. The new funding expands Figma’s runway during these uncertain times, with coronavirus halting a lot of enterprise purchasing and ultimately slowing growth of some rising enterprise players.
Field explained that Figma’s data is counter to the expected narrative around enterprise purchasing because Figma is specifically built to let teams collaborate in the cloud.
“We’re actually seeing a lot of acceleration for bigger deals on the sales side,” said Field. “Figma is a tool that can help right now.”
The company says that one interesting change they’ve seen in the COVID era is a significant jump in user engagement from teams to collaborate more in Figma. The firm has also seen an uptick in whiteboarding, note taking, slide deck creation and diagramming, as companies start using Figma as a collaborative tool across an entire organization rather than just within a team of designers.
This latest deal brings Figma’s total funding to $132.9 million. Field added that, though the company is not yet profitable, this latest financing gives the company three to four years of runway, even with aggressive scaling and hiring efforts moving forward.
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Figma raises million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz
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