It was less than two months ago that a new name appeared on Wall Street screens:FIG. The bell rings, traders cheer, the share price rises inexorably on the scoreboard. Figma, the start-up from San Francisco, is on the stock exchange. The share was issued at 33 dollars, but shortly after trading began it was already at 85 dollars, and by the evening it was over 115 dollars. Almost a tripling in a single day. Even hardened brokers are rubbing their eyes.
The fact that a design tool forone of the most spectacular IPOs of the decadeis remarkable. Figma, founded in 2012, once started out as a browser gimmick - a program that allowed designers to draw buttons and menus online, just like writing texts together in Google Docs. Today, millions of people around the world use Figma to design the interfaces of apps, websites and digital products. Spotify, BMW, Lufthansa, Sparkasse - anyone using an app is likely to have Figma traces somewhere in front of them.
Euphoria and disillusionment
The euphoria on the stock market was tremendous. "Figma-Stock more than triples on its first day of trading", wroteInvestopediasober (source:Investopedia, 07/31/2025). However, disillusionment followed just a few weeks later. The share price fell by more than 50 percent from its high. Analysts warned of an overvaluation. "Reality is catching up with the valuation", was the headline of the financial portalTipRanks (Those:TipRanks, 2025).
What remains is a company thatalmost one billion dollars in annual sales and growth rates ofover 40 percent per year and450,000 active users has an impressive base. But the stock market is asking for more: where is the next growth spurt, how can a design tool be turned into a platform that will generate billions over the years?
The collapse of the Adobe deal
The answer to this question was originally a different one: Adobe, the giant behind Photoshop, wanted to take over Figma in 2022 for 20 billion dollars. It would have been the most expensive takeover in the creative industry. However, antitrust watchdogs in the USA and Europe saw the risk of a monopoly and stopped the deal. By the end of 2023, the dream was over.
For Figma, this meant growing on its own, proving that it was not just a takeover target, but a shaper of the industry itself.
An inconspicuous purchase with a signal effect
And so, in June 2025, a message arrived that seemed unspectacular at first glance:Figma takes over the small open source projectPayloada so-calledHeadless CMS.
CMS - three letters that sound as exciting to most people as a Leitz folder in the office. But in the background, they control almost the entire web: content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal or modern headless variants such asContentful,Sanity orStoryblock. They regulate how texts, images, videos and data are stored and displayed on websites.
Payload was different from the big players: it was radically tailored to developers, open source, free to install. "Developers have flocked to Payload because you can customize virtually everything, because you can extend it however you want, and because the developer experience is simply better than the alternatives," Figma wrote in his own blog about the acquisition (source:Figma Blog, 18.06.2025). In the meantimePayload with theGithub Stars to the other major CMS platforms.
The key idea: anyone who designs a website in Figma should be able to publish it directly with the headless CMS Payload. No more marathon handovers, no more copying errors, no more weeks of waiting. Designers, editors and developers work in one flow.
"Content is no longer downstream"
Felipe Jaramillo, analyst at the trade magazineCMSWirecommented on the deal as follows: "CMS workflows are shifting to the left. Content is no longer downstream, but part of the design discussion from day one" (source:CMSWire, 2025).
In layman's terms, this means that content - i.e. text, images, data - does not just appear at the end when the website is almost finished. They are part of the design right from the start. If you build a page in Figma, you can immediately see how the text works, how the image moves the button, how the layout changes if the slogan is longer than expected.
This may sound trivial, but it is a fundamental shift. Until now, it was: design here, content there, developers somewhere in between. With Payload, Figma is pulling these parts together.
What this means for competitors
This is a challenge for the established headless CMS providers. Contentful has established itself with large corporations, Sanity shines with real-time collaboration, Storyblok with visual editing, Hygraph with GraphQL performance. But all of these systems remain outside the design world.
If Figma opens up its interfaces further, it is to be expected that other headless CMS will also seek to connect. Sanity could link its "studios" more deeply with Figma, Storyblok could pull its visual editing directly into the Figma interface. Contentful and Hygraph will not want to see Payload enter the playing field alone.
This makes the payload purchase more than just a takeover. It is a signal: the boundaries between design, content and code are becoming blurred.
A look at the competition: Vercel and v0
Figma is not alone in this vision. The company Vercel, known for its developer platform, is also working on a seamless transition. With theProjectv0.app design elements should be automaticallyReact code ready for production be translated. Instead of turning designers into developers or developers into designers, Vercel wants to automate the bridge.
So while Vercel comes from the code side, Figma approaches it from the design side. Both aim for the same thing: to make the transition between idea and implementation as smooth as possible.
What this means for e-commerce
This development is particularly exciting for e-commerce. Online stores today are highly complex constructs: Product data is stored in aPIM systemcontent in a headless CMS, the design in Figma, the logic in the store system, the implementation with developers. Every new landing page, every campaign, every translation is a project with many dependencies.
If Figma and Payload manage to bundle design, content and publishing in one tool, it will change the everyday life of entire teams. A fashion brand running new campaigns for Black Friday could design, populate and go live with new pages in a matter of days. A manufacturer like Porsche E-Bike Performance could bring international product launches to market faster with consistent design, text and localization.
For retailers, this means lower costs, shorter response times and fewer errors. For competitors, it means that their previous unique selling points are crumbling.
The big bet on artificial intelligence
At the same time, Figma is pushing itsAI-Offensiveahead. With theMake" project designers are to build interfaces that are provided with logic via chat: "What should this button do?" asks the machine, and spits out code directly. This code is still often buggy and unsuitable for large production systems. But the direction is clear: Figma wants to deliver not only designs, but also functioning applications.
This is reminiscent of Vercel's experiments with v0. It shows that the industry as a whole is on the move: the path from idea to finished product should be as short as possible.
Opportunities and risks
The opportunities are huge. Those who manage to map the entire cycle of idea, design, content and publication in one flow could become the dominant tool of the digital economy. But the risks are just as great.
The IPO has shown how quickly euphoria and disillusionment can alternate. The share is susceptible to any deviation from growth targets. And much also remains open in terms of technology: Will the generated code really be ready for production? Will Payload scale under Figma's roof in enterprise use? Will the headless CMS competitors follow suit before Figma has closed its ecosystem?
More than just an IPO
In the end, the IPO is just the loud prelude, the payload experiment is the real turning point. If Figma manages to establish content no longer as an afterthought but as an integral part of the design, it could rewrite the rules in headless e-commerce.
The vision is enticing: a world in which designers, developers and editors no longer work at cross-purposes, but instead interact in one tool. For some CMS providers this may seem threatening, for others it is an invitation. For investors, it remains a toss-up between the magic of vision and the sobriety of implementation.
