Lina Kahn is having an “I instructed you so” second.The previous FTC chair celebrated Figma’s stellar IPO in an X put up on Friday, nodding on the bigger motion, together with her personal efforts, to dam main tech mergers.”A terrific reminder that letting startups develop into independently profitable companies, reasonably than be purchased up by present giants, can generate huge worth,” Khan, who led the FTC from 2021 to 2025, stated. “A win for workers, buyers, innovation, and the general public.”Figma went public on Thursday, valued at $19.3 billion, and closed at 250% above its asking value, valuing the design firm at almost $68 billion and delivering a windfall to buyers.The IPO got here lower than two years after rival Adobe dropped its deliberate acquisition of Figma.The Adobe-Figma merger, valued at $20 billion, was referred to as off in December 2023 after dealing with regulatory stress from European and US officers.It was half of a bigger crackdown on antitrust enforcement that was pushed by Khan, who drew the ire of Silicon Valley due to her aggressive stance on antitrust points, particularly in Large Tech.
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“Figma is an enormous success, nevertheless it’s due to the corporate’s progressive development and never because of the FTC and Kahn,” Dan Ives, a tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, stated on Friday.Louis Lehot, a Silicon Valley-based associate at Foley & Lardner who advises on M&A and enterprise capital financing, stated that whereas the blockbuster IPO was an incredible end result for the corporate and buyers, “there is a trace of schadenfreude in celebrating unbiased success whereas dismissing the potential upside of the Adobe-Figma merger.””The Adobe-Figma merger was a missed alternative to pair complementary strengths and unlock broader worth. Impartial scaling and strategic acquisition aren’t mutually unique—every can serve innovation and the general public, relying on the context,” he added.Representatives for Figma and Khan didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark from Enterprise Insider.
