Digital Experience Firm Adobe to Buy Design Platform Figma for $20B

Digital experience company Adobe is to buy collaborative design platform Figma for about $20 billion in cash and stock.

The acquisition will boost makers’ creativity and productivity by adding Figma’s multiplayer workflows, design systems and developer ecosystem to Adobe’s range of tools and platforms that includes Photoshop, PDF and Adobe Experience Cloud, according to a Thursday (Sept. 15) press release.

“Adobe’s greatness has been rooted in our ability to create new categories and deliver cutting-edge technologies through organic innovation and inorganic acquisition,” Adobe Chairman and CEO Shantanu Narayen said in the release. “The combination of Adobe and Figma is transformational and will accelerate our vision for collaborative creativity.”

Figma was founded in 2012 and pioneered product design on the web. Today, it is used by millions of designers and has a loyal following among students, the release stated.

The combination of the Figma and Adobe product lines will appeal to hundreds of millions of customers, and capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technology will be added to the Figma platform, per the release.

“With Adobe’s amazing innovation and expertise, especially in 3D, video, vector, imaging and fonts, we can further reimagine end-to-end product design in the browser, while building new tools and spaces to empower customers to design products faster and more easily,” Figma Co-Founder and CEO Dylan Field said in the release.

The announcement of the acquisition comes about three months after Adobe and Home Depot deepened their partnership in a deal that is to see Adobe add “comprehensive insights” to help refine marketing investments.

Read more: Home Depot, Adobe to Expand Consumers’ Omnichannel Experience

This is to supplement Home Depot’s addition of digital tools like web analytics and A/B testing in its earlier work with Adobe, along with Creative Cloud applications for designing new tools.