Adobe’s $20 billion buyout of product design Figma was announced in September of 2022 and helped bolster the company’s growing name, but the acquisition has been called off.
Adobe and Figma have jointly announced that the merger has been mutually terminated by both parties. The companies have cited pressure from UK and EU regulators has for the reason the deal has been called off. When the acquisition was announced, regulators immediately expressed concern that such a move would create a monopoly under Adobe.
“Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently,” reads Adobe chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen’s statement. “While Adobe and Figma shared a vision to jointly redefine the future of creativity and productivity, we continue to be well positioned to capitalize on our massive market opportunity and mission to change the world through personalized digital experiences.”
The following was originally posted November 9, 2023:
Figma, a company whose product and interface design tools have been so successful that they are currently on the verge of a $20 billion acquisition by Adobe, have just announced a new suite of generative AI tools for its whiteboard application.
FigJam is Figma’s whiteboard tool that allows teams to work together to communicate and design projects in a way that is collaborative and engaging. Released in 2021, its popularity has now given birth to FigJam AI, a collection of generative AI tools that aims to enhance teams creativity and productivity by both smoothing out efficiency bottlenecks and giving new users prompts to work with.
In a statement to TechCrunch, Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita said, “We realized that, as it relates to FigJam, that there is really a big opportunity for us to get really creative around enabling people to collaborate and visually reimagine all sorts of meetings and things like that inside of our platform.”
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Currently in beta, FigJam AI used OpenAI foundation models, which Figma CEO Dylan Field told The Verge are easily swappable with other foundation AI models. A full release is planned to roll out to customers soon.
In an interview with The Verge, Field said, “Across the entire Figma platform, we’ve thought about all the ways that AI can be useful and narrowed it down to a few use cases where we can bake it into the product in a deep way that really helps. It really matters that you’re not doing everything that you can possibly think of, but rather the things that are most impactful.”
