SAN JOSE, Calif.—Adobe has entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire Figma, a major web-first collaborative design platform, for approximately $20 billion in cash and stock.

The deal is part of Adobe’s ongoing push to expand its tools for creative collaboration and builds on previous acquisitions of the work management platform Workfront in 2020 and the 2021 deal for Frame.io, a cloud-based video collaboration platform. 

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

Founded by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace in 2012, Figma pioneered product design on the web. Today, it offers tools for users designing interactive mobile and web applications to collaborate through multi-player workflows, sophisticated design systems and a rich, extensible developer ecosystem, the companies said.

In announcing the deal, Adobe said that Adobe’s and Figma’s expansive product portfolio will give the combined company will have a rare opportunity to power the future of work at a time when more people are working remotely or in hybrid work work conditions.   

It also stressed that Figma’s web-based, multi-player capabilities will accelerate the delivery of Adobe’s Creative Cloud technologies on the web, making the creative process more productive and accessible to more people.

In addition, the combined operations will benefit users in the product design process, from designers to product managers to developers, by bringing powerful capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technology into the Figma platform, the companies said. 

“Figma has built a phenomenal product design platform on the web,” said David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media business. “We look forward to partnering with their incredible team and vibrant community to accelerate our joint mission to reimagine the future of creativity and productivity.”

"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,” added Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO, Figma.

BURLINGTON, MASS.—Avid is rolling out the latest versions of its Maestro | Designer and Maestro | News graphic systems. The aim with these new updates is to give content creators the ability to create high resolution graphics more efficiently, according to Avid’s press release.

Maestro | Designer

Avid has enriched Maestro | Designer’s graphics authoring software with greater rendering power to allow content creators to create and view their content in 4K without having to adjust the resolution of their graphics. Improved workflow efficiencies have also been added to increase productivity and enable faster turnaround of content, including font handling, animation editing and mask editing. Users can also now set specific animation start and end points for playback, as well as have access to scalable vector graphics for resolution independence.

Updates to the Maestro | News on air graphic suite enables users to reuse content and mirror data between different production systems. A simplified workflow provides faster page creation and the ability to manage complex content through its rundown filtering capability. The unit now features Array control and exposers to set the timing of exported elements directly in the Maestro | Designer animation timeline while creating content. A new Auto Still Cue setting option for the video playback module allows a clip to display relevant metadata in its first frame or in point when the video item is cued. Video items can be added directly from the MediaCentral | Maestro News app to a MediaCentral | Newsroom Management rundown.

Both platforms are now available from Avid.