Under the shadow of tariffs, the software rising star Figma is looking to go public on the US stock market, potentially reigniting the US stock IPO craze.

The startup software company Figma, focusing on application design and collaborative software development, has secretly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on the U.S. stock market. This comes after over a year since the merger plan with Adobe, the popular creative software developer behind Photoshop and Illustrator, fell through. The San Francisco-based software company announced on Tuesday local time that it has submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for listing. Figma was valued at around $12.5 billion in a financing round in 2024. Considered as one of the strongest new forces in the global software industry, Figma's application for listing on the U.S. stock market at this moment is expected to reignite global capital's enthusiasm for investing in the U.S. IPO market, and even spark a new wave of investment in tech stocks such as Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia, which are facing a wave of sell-offs. The aggressive tariff policy of U.S. President Trump has led to a fundraising paralysis in the U.S. IPO market, leaving Wall Street investment banks struggling. Plans for tech companies such as Klarna Group Plc, Chime, Cerebras Systems, and eToro Group Ltd. to go public have been put on hold, as these companies have announced a temporary halt to their U.S. IPO processes. It is understood that the startup company Figma, focused on application and website design software and collaborative software development, has maintained its momentum since terminating the "Century Merger" with Adobe at the end of 2023 due to antitrust pressure from regulatory authorities. Figma then focused on improving the usability of its existing products for software engineers, website and platform designers, including the introduction of a software tool ecosystem called "Developer Mode" to promote collaboration between professional software developers and website and platform designers. According to a company spokesperson, the number of Figma employees has increased from 500 in early 2022 to 1,600 last month. Public information shows that the U.S.-based startup software company Figma provides a range of software tools crucial for designers and software developers, meeting the needs of increasingly diverse application scenarios. For example, Figma Design is primarily used for creating, sharing, and testing designs for digital products such as websites and mobile apps, supporting real-time collaboration; FigJam is an online whiteboard platform suitable for brainstorming, meeting notes, and process diagram drawing; Dev Mode aims to simplify collaboration between design and development, helping website and platform designers and senior software developers communicate more efficiently; Figma Slides is primarily used for creating presentations, supporting seamless integration with design files, covering automatic layouts to advanced properties, making presentation design more professional and efficient. With the widespread rise of remote work and cross-department collaboration, the demand for design collaboration tools continues to grow rapidly. Figma's real-time collaboration and cloud platform features give it a significant competitive advantage in the design tool market, and the aforementioned software products together form Figma's design collaboration software ecosystem, widely used in UI/UX design, product management, application development, and marketing fields. As of 2024, Figma has a user base of over 4 million, with its B2B clients including well-known tech companies such as Microsoft, social platform X, Dropbox, Stripe, Slack, and GitHub. In June 2024, Figma's annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached $700 million, growing by 35% year-on-year. With its continued innovation in product ecosystem, strong user base, and ongoing market expansion, Figma's performance is expected to continue to grow rapidly in the coming years.