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David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media unit, speaks at Adobe’s Max conference in Los Angeles in October 2022.

Adobe

In September 2009, with the stock market still in the doldrums from the Great Recession, Adobe announced plans to spend $1.8 billion for marketing software vendor Omniture, its second-biggest acquisition ever at the time.

Prior to the deal getting announced, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said at a meeting that he’s “always trying to not waste a good crisis,” according to the recollection of John Mellor, who was executive vice president at Omniture and stayed on at Adobe for almost 10 more years.

There’s a similarly opportunistic sentiment in the air today. With over three-quarters of 2022 in the books, Adobe’s stock is down 43% this year and on pace for its worst year since 2008, the depths of the financial crisis. This time, the company faces an economic downturn highlighted by soaring inflation.

Last month, Adobe agreed to pay $20 billion for Figma, the largest takeover of a private software company and a sum more than four times greater than what Adobe had ever spent in an acquisition. While Narayen is still CEO, he’s not the person who spearheaded this deal. That distinction belongs to the president of Adobe’s sprawling digital media business, David Wadhwani, according to people familiar with the transaction who asked not to be named because the details were private.

Wadhwani, 51, has spent more than a decade at Adobe over two separate stints, rejoining the company in mid-2021 after six years in other Silicon Valley executive and investing roles. Wadhwani, Adobe’s third highest-paid executive after Narayen, 59, and finance chief Dan Durn, is in the driver’s seat to become the next CEO, a position strengthened internally by the Figma deal, some people close to Adobe said. A former executive told CNBC that everyone is wondering when Wadhwani will get the promotion.

In January, Wadhwani and Anil Chakravarthy, the head of Adobe’s marketing software business, were each named as presidents of the company, a title Narayen had held since 2005. Chakravarthy joined Adobe in 2020 after serving four years as CEO of Informatica.

Some sources close to the company said Wadhwani and Chakravarthy are both strong contenders but cautioned that Narayen isn’t leaving anytime soon. The business Wadhwani oversees is roughly three times the size as Chakravarthy’s in terms of revenue.

For Wadhwani, Figma represents a risky bet on growth at a time when Wall Street is telling tech companies to tighten their belts and preserve cash. Assuming the deal closes, Adobe is paying about 50 times annual recurring revenue, and a price equal to double Figma’s private valuation last year, even with cloud stocks broadly down by more than half in the past 12 months. At the time of the announcement, the purchase price amounted to about 12% of Adobe’s market cap, compared to almost 10% for Omniture 13 years ago.

Cloud stocks and Adobe past year

CNBC

Figma founder and CEO Dylan Field will report to Wadhwani. Brad Rencher, former head of Adobe’s marketing software group, said Wadhwani’s elevated status became abundantly clear to him when he first read of the acquisition.

“I was like, OK, David was the sponsor. He was the one standing up and doing it,” said Rencher, who’s now CEO of BambooHR, a startup in Utah. A move that big doesn’t happen without the CEO’s support, Rencher said.

Narayen told CNBC’s Jon Fortt last month that he and Field had held “multiple conversations” over the years. Field said at a conference recently that Adobe first reached out to Figma in 2012, days after he announced the startup. But Adobe waited a decade to pounce, giving Figma time to show that it could succeed selling its software inside large companies such as Microsoft.

The make-or-break bet

In his 15-year tenure as CEO, Narayen hasn’t been shy about dealmaking, just at a smaller size. He orchestrated several billion-dollar-plus deals, including Omniture. The biggest prior to Figma was marketing automation software provider Marketo, which Adobe bought for $4.75 billion in 2018.

Figma is different. It shows Adobe’s willingness to pay top dollar for a trendy asset and let it run independently, rather than just buying companies and integrating their capabilities into existing products. And it might be Wadhwani’s make-or-break opportunity to prove he should be CEO of the fourth-biggest U.S. business software company by market cap.

Among past and current colleagues, Wadhwani is known to be unnervingly still in meetings, speaking in a slow and measured manner and often wrapping up by summarizing the three most critical points that were discussed. Rencher said there’s a clear similarity to his boss.

“He’s made in Shantanu’s image,” Rencher said.

Still, he can become passionate and animated. Rencher recalls a company offsite for executives a little over a decade ago at a spa resort in Carmel Valley, California, about two hours south of Adobe’s headquarters in San Jose. There was an icebreaker to try and ease the executives into conversation. But Wadhwani was ready to get down to business.

“We’ve got to change something or we’re going to be in trouble,” Wadhwani said, according to Rencher’s memory of the event.

Adobe said Wadhwani wasn’t available for an interview and the company declined to comment on succession planning.

Wadhwani is said to be a dedicated family man, with a wife, two daughters and a dog, though he allows himself one indulgence. When he travels on business, he insists on eating McDonald’s at airports. In particular, he loves the French fries, a former colleague said.

At Adobe, Wadhwani has been at the center of one of the most important shifts in the company’s 39-year history: the move from perpetual licenses to subscriptions. When Adobe revealed the grand plan for a new business model to analysts in 2011, Wadhwani was tasked with announcing the prices.

“We believe that over the course of the next few years as a result of this, we’ll attract over 800,000 new users — new incremental users to our Creative Suite — and do it in a way that’s good for the customer and good for Adobe,” Wadhwani said.

Revenue growth slowed and eventually declined as Adobe made its strategic and technological changes. But each quarter, hundreds of thousands more people signed up for Creative Cloud, a bundled subscription offering of key Adobe products such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro.

Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe

Mark Neuling | CNBC

The revenue became more predictable and less closely associated with product releases. Investors responded by pushing the stock price above the $50 mark in late 2013 for the first time. It kept rising, and by 2016, nearly 7 million people were subscribing to Creative Cloud. In all, the stock price soared 233% over those four and a half years, compared with a 67% rise for the S&P 500.

Prior to the Creative Cloud launch, executives discussed the vision at an executive meeting at a lodge in Sausalito, California, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

It wasn’t a universally popular idea to bet the company on a new revenue model that was just starting to gain mass adoption in software. But Wadhwani spoke up in the middle of a disagreement and made clear that he saw real value in the effort. He showed the group early drawings of the product from company designers, said Michael Gough, a former Adobe vice president, who was in attendance.

“He was the one that was sort of rallying people to take it seriously,” Gough said. “Let’s talk about what would we actually do. What are we missing from the stack? What kind of resources would it take? He was taking the vision and creating a working plan, basically, and getting people to at least talk about the possibility of doing it.”

Jumping to a startup

By 2015, the subscription business was humming. Adobe significantly outperformed its target for paid Creative Cloud subscriptions. In June of that year, Wadhwani presented for the first time on an Adobe quarterly earnings call with analysts.

Three months later, he resigned “to pursue a CEO opportunity,” as Adobe stated in a press release. The new gig was made public a couple weeks later, when data analytics startup AppDynamics said Wadhwani would be taking over for Jyoti Bansal, a star founder in the software industry and the Bay Area.

Wadhwani told colleagues when he left that he wanted to be a CEO, said a former Adobe employee. Internally, there was chatter that he’d come to see that he wouldn’t be the next CEO of Adobe, according to a former executive.

Bansal, who’d guided AppDynamics into the billion-dollar startup club, was resistant to the idea of bringing in an outside CEO, said Steve Harrick, a partner at Institutional Venture Partners, an early backer of the company. Wadhwani eventually won over Bansal, who didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Harrick said that Wadhwani would frequently follow up with him after board meetings that ended without resolution on important matters. As CEO, Wadhwani pushed for engineers to build software in-house to broaden its offerings to existing customers, Harrick said. He also guided the company to become more dependent on revenue from subscriptions, rather than from more traditional licenses, an evolution he had advanced at Adobe.

Wadhwani was quickly poised to be CEO of a public company, after AppDynamics filed for its IPO in 2016. Early the following year, the company was set to raise almost $200 million and trade on the Nasdaq until Cisco showed up at the last minute and agreed to pay $3.7 billion for AppDynamics, more than double its expected valuation.

One day before its IPO, Cisco buys AppDynamics

“They were not dual-tracking. They were not trying to be bought,” said Harrick. “They were earnestly saying, ‘This is a public company, that’s our marching orders.'”

Wadhwani stayed at Cisco after the acquisition. With Cisco trying to expand beyond networking and telecommunications gear and into software, Wadhwani advocated for the company to do more deals, suggesting it look at Datadog and HashiCorp, according to a former Cisco executive.

Neither deal happened. Datadog went public in September 2019, followed by HashiCorp in December 2021. However, Cisco did invest in HashiCorp in 2020.

Wadhwani left Cisco in October 2019 to join venture firm Greylock Partners, an early investor in AppDynamics. Less than two years later, he rejoined Adobe to again run the digital media business, but this time with bigger aspirations.

“He missed having a group of people around him where they were doing a lot of stuff together,” said Mona Akmal, co-founder and CEO of sales software startup Falkon, which was Wadhwani’s first Greylock investment.

Akmal told Wadhwani she wanted him to stick with her even as he pursued a job elsewhere. He’s continued attending every board meeting, she said.

Akmal said she wasn’t surprised to see Wadhwani return to an operating role, as she would joke with him that he was born to be a CEO. He’s tall and handsome, and his hair is always perfect, she said. She would ask about his hair, which has turned largely white, and question why he hasn’t dyed it.

“Are we doing the white hair because we want to look more executive?” she remembered asking him. “He would give you the smile, like, ‘Maybe.'”

Wadhwani rapidly got up to speed upon his return to San Jose. He’s participated in all three of Adobe’s quarterly earnings calls with analysts this year, providing details on Creative Cloud and, more recently, the Figma deal.

Internally, his targets included reaching creative professionals who are becoming more willing to collaborate, growing Document Cloud after the pandemic boosted e-signature rival DocuSign and popularizing Adobe Express to address the low end of the market, a former executive said.

‘Really important shift’

He’s been recruiting top talent, bringing back product veteran Deepa Subramaniam and technologist Ely Greenfield, who was technology chief at AppDynamics under Wadhwani.

At Adobe’s annual Max conference in Los Angeles this month, Wadhwani took the stage for the first time since 2014, and highlighted to analysts the opportunities to expand the digital media business.

He said the company was making “a really important shift and transition,” directing people who show interest in working with PDF files toward free services and then introducing them to premium capabilities. Wadhwani said the company has taken a page from its Document Cloud business and applied it to Creative Cloud, encouraging customers to pay for additional services.

At the event, Wadhwani said Figma’s popular design collaboration tools can accelerate Adobe’s effort to get more people engaging with documents in Adobe applications, thus widening the pool of potential customers. He invited Field to join him onstage and talk about Figma’s current projects.

Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, speaks at the startup’s Config conference in San Francisco on May 10, 2022.

Figma

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen: We're looking to build this company for the long run

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SK Hynix continues monster $80 billion rally as its readies next-gen chips for Nvidia

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SK Hynix continues monster  billion rally as its readies next-gen chips for Nvidia

A man walks past a logo of SK Hynix at the lobby of the company’s Bundang office in Seongnam on January 29, 2021.

Jung Yeon-Je | AFP | Getty Images

South Korean memory chipmaker SK Hynix said Friday that it was ready to mass produce its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips, staying ahead of rivals and sending the company’s stock soaring. 

HBM is a type of memory that is used in chipsets for artificial-intelligence computing, including in chips from global AI giant Nvidia — a major client of SK Hynix. 

SK Hynix said earlier this year that it had shipped samples of its HBM4 chips to customers, as it sought to beat competitors including Samsung Electronics and Micron Technologies.

According to its announcement Friday, the company has finished its internal validation and quality assurance process for HBM4 and is ready to manufacture those at scale.

“Completion of HBM4 development will be a new milestone for the industry,” said Joohwan Cho, head of HBM development at SK Hynix.

HBM4 is the sixth generation of HBM technology — a type of Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM. DRAM can be found in personal computers, workstations and servers and is used to store data and program code.

SK Hynix’s latest HBM4 product has doubled bandwidth and increased power efficiency by 40% compared to the previous generation, according to the company.  

Notably, HBM4 is expected to be the main AI memory chip needed for Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin architecture — a more powerful AI chip for global data centers — said Dan Nystedt, vice-president at TriOrient, an Asia-based private investment firm with a focus on semiconductors.

“SK Hynix is a key supplier for Nvidia, and the announcement shows it remains far ahead of rivals,” he said.

Samsung Electronics and Micron have struggled to catch up to SK Hynix in HBM, as it builds on its segment leadership and benefits from being Nvidia’s main HBM supplier. 

However, the companies have made some progress. Micron has also shipped samples of its HBM4 products to customers, while Samsung has reportedly been working to get its HBM4 chips certified by Nvidia. 

“Despite the shifting competitive landscape, we anticipate SK Hynix will maintain a commanding position, potentially securing around 50% of the HBM market share by 2026,” said MS Hwang, research director at Counterpoint Research, covering memory solutions.

SK Hynix shares rose more than 7% Friday to hit their highest since 2000, following its chip announcement, bringing year-to-date gains to nearly 90%. Shares of Samsung Electronics and Micron have risen over 40% and nearly 80% in 2025, respectively.

SK Hynix posted record operating profit and revenue for its June-quarter, thanks to strong HBM demand, which accounted for 77% of its overall revenues. The company’s market capitalization has increased by more than $80 billion since the start of the year, according to data from S&P Capital IQ.

The firm expects to double HBM sales for the full year compared to 2024, and for demand from AI to continue to grow into 2026.

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Klarna IPO and ASML’s Mistral bet revive Europe’s tech dreams

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Klarna IPO and ASML's Mistral bet revive Europe's tech dreams

Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and Co-Founder of Swedish fintech Klarna, gives a thumbs up during the company’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., Sept. 10, 2025.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

LONDON — It’s been a busy week for the European technology sector.

On Tuesday, London-headquartered artificial intelligence startup ElevenLabs announced it would let employees sell shares in a secondary round that doubles its valuation to $6.6 billion.

Then, Dutch chip firm ASML on Wednesday confirmed it was leading French AI firm Mistral’s 1.7 billion-euro Series C funding round at a valuation of 11.7 billion euros ($13.7 billion) — up from 5.8 billion euros last year. Mistral is considered a competitor to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

To cap it off, Swedish fintech firm Klarna on Thursday debuted on the New York Stock Exchange after a long-awaited initial public offering. Klarna shares ended the day at $45.82, giving it a market value of over $17 billion.

These developments have revived hopes that Europe is capable of developing a tech industry that can compete with the U.S. and Asia. For the past decade, investors have been talking up Europe’s potential to build valuable tech firms, rebuffing the idea that Silicon Valley is the only place to create innovative new ventures.

Buy now, pay later firm Klarna valued at $17 billion after U.S. IPO

However, dreams of a “golden era” of European tech never quite came to fruition.

A key curveball came in the form of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which caused inflation to soar and global central banks to hike interest rates as a result. Higher rates are considered bad for capital-intensive tech firms, which often need to raise cash to grow.

Ironically, that same year, Klarna — which at one point was valued as much as $45.6 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank — had its market value slashed 85% to $6.7 billion.

Now, Europe’s venture capital investors view the recent buzz around the region’s tech firms as less of a renaissance and more of a “growing wave.”

“This started 25 years ago when we saw the first signs of a European tech ecosystem inspired by the original dotcom boom that was very much a Silicon Valley affair,” Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton Capital, told CNBC.

Balderton has backed a number of notable European tech names including fintech firm Revolut and self-driving vehicle tech developer Wayve.

“There have been temporary setbacks: the 2008 financial crisis, the post-Covid tech slump, but the ecosystem has bounced back stronger each time,” Chandratillake said.

“Right now, the confluence of a huge new technological opportunity in the form of generative AI, as well as a community that has done it before and has access to the capital required, is, unsurprisingly, yielding a huge number of sector-defining companies,” he added.

Europe vs. U.S.

Investors backing the continent’s tech startups say there’s plenty of money to be made — particularly amid the economic uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.

For one, there’s a clear discount on European tech right now. Venture firm Atomico’s annual “State of European Tech” report last year pegged the value of the European tech ecosystem at $3 trillion and predicted it will reach $8 trillion by 2034. Compare that to the story in the U.S., where the tech sector’s biggest megacap stocks combined are worth over $20 trillion.

“Ten years ago, there wasn’t a single European startup valued at over $50 billion; today, there are several,” Jan Hammer, partner at Index Ventures, which has backed the likes of Revolut and Adyen, told CNBC.

“Tens of thousands of people now have firsthand experience building and scaling global companies from companies such as Revolut, Alan, Mistral and Adyen,” Hammer added. “Crucially, European startups are no longer simply expanding abroad — they are born global from day one.”

Read more CNBC tech news

Amy Nauikoas, founder and CEO of fintech investor Anthemis, suggested that investors may be viewing Europe as something of a safe haven market amid heightened geopolitical risks and macroeconomic uncertainty.

“This is an investing opportunity for sure,” Nauikoas told CNBC. “Macroeconomic dislocation always favors early-stage entrepreneurial disruption and innovation.”

“This time around, trends in family office, capital shifts … and the general constipation of the U.S. institutional allocation market suggest that there should be a lot more money flowing from … global investors to U.K. [and] European private markets.”

Problems remain

Despite the bullish sentiment surrounding European tech, there remain systemic challenges that make it harder for the region’s tech firms to achieve the scale of their U.S. and Asian counterparts.

Startup investors have been pushing for more allocation from pension funds into venture capital funds in Europe for some time. And the European market is highly fragmented, with regulations varying from country to country.

“There’s really nothing that stops European tech companies to scale, to become huge,” Niklas Zennström. CEO and founding partner of early Klarna investor Atomico, told CNBC.

“However, there’s some conditions that make it harder,” he added. “We still don’t have a single market.”

Several tech entrepreneurs and investors have backed a new initiative called “EU Inc.” Launched last year, its aim is to boost the European Union’s tech sector via the formation of a “28th regime” — a proposed pan-European legal framework to simplify the complex regulations across various individual EU member states.

“Europe is in a bad headspace at the moment for quite obvious reasons, but I don’t think a lot of the founders who are there really are,” Bede Moore, chief commercial officer of early-stage investment firm Antler, told CNBC.

“At best, what you can say is that there’s this secondary tailwind, which is that people are feeling galvanized by the need for Europe to … be a bit more self-standing.”

WATCH: CNBC interviews Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski

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Winklevoss-founded Gemini reportedly prices IPO at $28 per share, valuing the crypto exchange at $3.3 billion

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Winklevoss-founded Gemini reportedly prices IPO at  per share, valuing the crypto exchange at .3 billion

Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss (L-R), creators of crypto exchange Gemini Trust Co., on stage at the Bitcoin 2021 Convention, a cryptocurrency conference held at the Mana Convention Center in Wynwood in Miami, Florida, on June 4, 2021.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Gemini Space Station, the crypto company founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, priced its initial public offering at $28 per share late Thursday, according to Bloomberg.

A person familiar with the offering told the news service that the company priced the offering above its expected range of $24 to $26, which would value the company at $3.3 billion.

Since Gemini capped the value of the offering at $425 million, 15.2 million shares were sold, according to the report. That was a measure of high demand for the crypto company, which had initially marketed 16.67 million shares. Earlier this week, it increased its proposed price range from between $17 and $19 apiece.

A Gemini spokesperson could not confirm the report.

The company and the selling stockholders granted its underwriters — led by and Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley — a 30-day option to sell an additional 452,807 and 380,526 shares, respectively, per the registration form. Gemini stock will trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol “GEMI.”

Up to 30% of the shares offered will be reserved for retail investors through Robinhood, SoFi, Hong Kong-based Futu Securities, Singapore’s Moomoo Financial, Webull and other platforms.

Gemini, which primarily operates as a cryptocurrency exchange, was founded by the Winklevoss brothers in 2014 and holds more than $21 billion of assets on its platform as of the end of July.

Initial trading will give the market a sense of how long it can keep the crypto IPO party going. Circle Internet and Bullish had successful listings, but there has been a recent consolidation in the prices of blue chip cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether. Also, in contrast to those companies’ profitability, Gemini has reported widening losses, especially in 2025. Per its registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gemini posted a net loss of $159 million in 2024, and in the first half of this year, it lost $283 million.

This week, however, Gemini received a big vote of institutional confidence when Nasdaq said it’s making a strategic investment of $50 million in the crypto company. Nasdaq is seeking to offer its clients access to Gemini’s custodial services, and gain a distribution partner for its trade management system known as Calypso.

Gemini also offers a crypto-backed credit card, and last month, launched another card in partnership with Ripple. The latter garnered more than 30,000 credit card sign-ups in August, a new monthly high that was more than twice the number of credit card sign-ups in the prior month, according to the S-1 filing.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

(Learn the best 2026 strategies from inside the NYSE with Josh Brown and others at CNBC PRO Live. Tickets and info here.)

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