Index Ventures Partner Danny Rimer invested in Figma in 2012, shortly after the company was founded. Dylan Field founded Figma, and they started developing software tools for designers.
Rimer invited Field for dinner to celebrate the deal, but the young entrepreneur hesitated to say he was just 19. Rimer went ahead with the dinner and made more investments in the company. Today Index Ventures is the largest external shareholder of Figma.
On Thursday, Adobe Inc. said it acquired Figma in a deal valued at $20 billion. According to data from Pitchbook, this deal will be the largest in value for a Venture capital-backed company in 20 years.
The field is now 30 years old, and both Rimer and himself stand to make plenty of money from the sale of Figma to Adobe Inc.
Index Ventures hold more than a 12 % stake in Figma, according to a person known to the business and who requested not to be named as the matter is confidential. Figma and Rimer declined to comment on the value of Index Ventures’ stake in Figma. The company’s first investment, followed by subsequent ones, is now valued at around $ 2.6 billion.
Early Impression
CEO of Figma now, Dylan Field, made a good impression on Rimer as an intern on Flipboard. Flipboard made news aggregation apps, and Rimer, who was on its board once watched Filed give a slick presentation.
Field went to college for a brief period but soon dropped out to join a Peter Thiel-funded fellowship program. He later went on to work on Figma. Field told Rimer initially that he would spend around three years developing the design software tools and then release them to the customers. Rimer noted that it was not a small incremental thing then.
Figma had several top Venture Capital firms on the panel who backed the start-up. In 2015, Greylock partners funded $15 million as lead investors; in 2018, Kleiner Perkins led a funding round of $25 million. The early investors have a stake of nearly 11 % in Figma today, according to some people familiar with the company.
According to another source, the early investors invested $ 2 billion each in Figma. In 2019, Sequoia Capital invested in Figma, valuing them at $440 million at the time of investment. Andrew Reed, the partner at Sequoia Capital, had done the deal and tweeted the photo of the original agreement.
The total investment by Sequoia Capital in Figma was $97 million, amounting to a 6% stake in Figma. Sequoia’s investment is now worth $1.3 billion, and this single investment is more than the total value of the US growth fund from where it originated.
Andreessen Horowitz, a private VC firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, invested in Figma in 2020. Its stake is now valued at $500 million.
