Eye on AI | Fortune Quirky

Figma cofounder and CEO Dylan Field in San Francisco on June 24, 2021. (Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

About a year and a half after Adobe’s attempted $20 billion acquisition of it collapsed, the design software unicorn Figma has taken a step towards a new future in the public markets.

Figma on Tuesday filed paperwork to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares of the San Francisco company will trade under the ticker “FIG.”

Figma did not provide details of how much it expects to raise in the offering or the valuation it is seeking. 

But its S-1 filing, larded with more than 200 references to AI, comes at a moment when the market for venture-backed IPOs looks better than it has in some time, from the meteoric debuts of AI infrastructure company CoreWeave (up 290% from its IPO price) to the blowout triumph of stablecoin firm Circle (up 519%).

The design company’s business is growing robustly. In Q1 2025, Figma’s revenue increased 46% to $228.2 million from $156.2 million in Q1 2024, according to the filing. 

A key question is whether the company can top the $20 billion valuation that Adobe was prepared to pay for it before the deal fell through due to intractable regulatory resistance, particularly in the U.K. 

Figma must also make the case that it can harness the power of generative AI to tap into new growth without itself becoming a victim of AI. 

Either way, prepare for one of the most anticipated IPOs of 2025. —Allie Garfinkle

You might be asking: How’s the vibe over at the most valuable private AI company as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg uses his prodigious war chest to scoop up top AI talent?

In a word: tense.

“We have gone from some nerds in the corner to the most interesting people in the tech industry (at least),” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly wrote on the company’s Slack instance. “AI Twitter is toxic; Meta is acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful; I assume things will get even crazier in the future. After I got fired and came back I said that was not the craziest thing that would happen in OpenAl history; certainly neither is this.”

At least four names on the poaching list Meta publicly shared came from OpenAI.

But in his remarks, which were first obtained by Wired, Altman was defiant.

“Meta has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list; they have been trying to recruit people for a super long time.”

He added later: “Missionaries will beat mercenaries.”

Still, every man has a price, as the saying goes. According to a separate Wired report, Zuckerberg offered the crème de la crème of his new recruits “pay packages of up to $300 million over four years,” with a third of that coming in the first year. —AN

Tired of AI companies picking through your website to train their models? Cloudflare may have the tool for you.

The software company, known for its work in securing and managing traffic to websites, announced on Tuesday a new tool—currently in private beta—that throttles AI bot crawlers and forces them to receive permission for access, if not payment.

You could call it an on-demand toll plaza for AI training. Cloudflare calls it “pay per crawl.”

“Instead of a blanket block or uncompensated open access, we want to empower content owners to monetize their content at Internet scale,” the company wrote in a blog post. 

The new system—which, for the webmasters, leverages HTTP response code 402—can require payment at a configured, domain-wide price. Publishers can still allow designated crawlers through if they wish. (Say, if they negotiate an agreement directly.)

“At its core, pay per crawl begins a technical shift in how content is controlled online,” Cloudflare added. “By providing creators with a robust, programmatic mechanism for valuing and controlling their digital assets, we empower them to continue creating the rich, diverse content that makes the Internet invaluable.” —AN