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Adyen reported a big miss on first-half sales Thursday. The news drove a $20 billion rout in the company’s market capitalization .

Pavlo Gonchar | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Spirits were high when Dutch payments firm Adyen floated on the Amsterdam stock exchange in 2018.

The company was riding a wave of growth in Europe’s technology sector and snapping up competition from its mega U.S. rival PayPal.

Since then, the company has weathered a turbulent ride, including a global pandemic that knocked volumes from travel clients significantly.

The firm expanded aggressively in North America, where some of its most high-profile merchants are based, and hired hundreds of employees to turbocharge growth.

As the macroeconomic environment shifted in 2023, Adyen’s growth strategy has been challenged in a big way.

The company’s shares plummeted 39% on Thursday, erasing 18 billion euros ($20 billion) from Adyen’s market capitalization, as investors dumped the stock after the firm reported its slowest revenue growth on record.

The stock closed down a further 2.9% on Friday after the precipitous decline of Thursday.

What is Adyen?

Identified as one of the top 200 global fintech companies globally by CNBC and Statista, Adyen is a payments services firm that works with customers including Netflix, Meta and Spotify.

It also sells point-of-sale systems for physical stores and handles payments online and in-store.

More than a processor, Adyen is what is known as a payment gateway — meaning it uses technology to enable merchants to take card payments and transactions through online stores.

The company takes a small cut off every deal that runs through its platform.

It was co-founded by Pieter van der Does, the firm’s chief executive officer, and Arnout Schuijff, former chief technology officer.

What just happened?

Adyen last week reported results for the first half of the year that came in well below expectations. The company’s revenue of 739.1 million euros for the period was up 21% year over year — but showed Adyen’s slowest sales growth on record.

Analyst had expected 853.6 million euros of revenue and 40% of year-on-year growth, according to Refinitiv Eikon forecasts.

Adyen has typically been viewed as a growth stock, after consistently reporting revenue growth of 26% each half-year period since its 2018 stock market debut.

“With higher inflation, leading to higher interest rates, there has been a bit of a shift of focus — less focus on growth, more focus on bottom line,” Adyen’s chief financial officer, Ethan Tandowsky, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday.

Tandowsky insisted that the company had “limited churn” and that none of its large customers had left the platform.

But concerns that competitors in local markets, particularly in North America, are muscling in with cheaper offerings have heavily weighed on company prospects.

Adyen said in a letter to shareholders last week that its EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) margin fell to 43% in the first half of 2023 from 59% in the same period a year ago.

The company said this was down to softer growth in North America and to higher employment costs such as wages, as it ramped up hiring during the period.

Tandowsky insisted the company had more of a focus on “functionality” than its peers, even though those peers may offer cheaper services.

“The efficiency of which we can develop new functionality, functionality that outperforms our peers will lead us to gaining the market share that we expect.”

Structural challenges

At the heart of Adyen’s woes is a business heavily dependent on customers’ willingness to stick to a single platform for their all their payment needs. The company also needs to convince those users that what it sells is better than what’s on offer from a competitor.

In its half-year 2023 report, Adyen said that many of its North American customers are cutting back on costs to weather economic pressures like rising interest rates and higher inflation.

“Enterprise businesses prioritized cost optimization, while competition for digital volumes in the region provided savings over functionality,” Adyen said in a letter to shareholders.

“These dynamics are not new, and online volumes are easiest to transition back and forth. Amid these developments, we consciously continued to price for the value we bring.”

Adyen also said its profitability had suffered from a push to aggressively ramp up hiring. EBITDA came in at 320 million euros, down 10% from the first half of 2022.

Adyen added 551 employees in the first half of the year, taking its total full-time employee count up to 3,883.

Some of the company’s rivals have cut back on hiring significantly. In November 2022, Stripe laid off 14% of its workforce, or about 1,100 people.

The main challenge Adyen now faces is competition from challengers that are willing to offer lower rates than it provides.

Speaking with the Financial Times on Thursday, Adyen CEO van der Does said that merchants are “trying to explore local providers” to cut down on costs.

“It’s not that we’re shrinking — we’re just growing at a slower rate,” he added.

Adyen has historically been a lean business, opting to hire fewer people overall than its main competitor Stripe, which has roughly double the staffing.

Simon Taylor, head of strategy at Sardine.ai, said Adyen might face a “natural ceiling” to what business size it can reach before having to reduce its margins to grow again.

“Ultimately they’re subject to the same macro headwinds everyone in e-commerce is,” Taylor told CNBC. “And they still grew 21%. Incumbents would kill for that.”

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Google promotes ‘AI Mode’ on home page ‘Doodle’

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Google promotes ‘AI Mode’ on home page 'Doodle'

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images

The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.

Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.

The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”

Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”

AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.

“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.

AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.

In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.

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How a beer-making process is used to make cleaner disposable diapers

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How a beer-making process is used to make cleaner disposable diapers

Clean Start: Startup focuses on making diapers renewable

Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.

One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.

A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.

ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.

“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.

ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.

“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.

The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.

ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.

“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.

Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon.  The company has raised a total of $35 million.

The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.

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Figma files for IPO on NYSE, plans to ‘take big swings’ with acquisitions

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Figma files for IPO on NYSE, plans to 'take big swings' with acquisitions

Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, appears at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on May 9, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Design software company Figma filed for an IPO on Tuesday, and plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol “FIG.”

The offering would be one of the hotly anticipated IPOs in recent years given Figma’s growth rate and its high private market valuation. In late 2023, a $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped due to regulatory concerns in the U.K. That led Adobe to pay Figma a $1 billion termination fee.

Revenue in the first quarter increased 46% to $228.2 million from $156.2 million in the same period a year ago, according to Figma’s prospectus. The company recorded a net income of $44.9 million, compared to $13.5 million a year earlier.

As of March 31, Figma had around 450,000 customers. Of those, 1,031 were contributing at least $100,000 a year to annual revenue, up 47% from a year earlier. Clients include Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Netflix. More than half of revenue comes from outside the U.S.

Figma didn’t say how many shares it plans to sell in the IPO. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a tender offer last year, and in April it announced that it had confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC.

Wall Street banks predicted a rush of IPOs after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November following a dry spell dating back to late 2021, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets. While President Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs in April roiled markets and led a number of companies to delay their plans, activity has been picking up of late.

Stablecoin issuer Circle doubled in value in its early June debut and is now up more than sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of almost $43 billion. Online banking company Chime also debuted in June, following Hinge Health’s IPO in May. Artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in March, jumped 46% in June and has quadrupled since its offering.

Circle would be the largest regulated stablecoin if GENIUS Act passes, says Bernstein's Chhugani

Buy now, pay later company Klarna, based in the U.K., filed for a U.S. IPO in March, as did ticket marketplace StubHub.

Figma was founded in 2012 by CEO Dylan Field, 33, and Evan Wallace, and is based in San Francisco. The company had 1,646 employees as of March 31.

Before establishing Figma, Field spent over two years at Brown University, where he met Wallace. Field then took a Thiel Fellowship “to pursue entrepreneurial projects,” according to the filing. The two-year program that Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel established in 2011 gives young entrepreneurs a $200,000 grant along with support from founders and investors, according to an online description.

Field is the biggest individual owner of Figma, with 56.6 million Class B shares and 51.1% of voting power ahead of the IPO. He said in a letter to investors that it was time for Figma to buck the “trend of many amazing companies staying privately indefinitely.”

Databricks, SpaceX and Stripe are among high-valued companies that are still private.

“Some of the obvious benefits such as good corporate hygiene, brand awareness, liquidity, stronger currency and access to capital markets apply,” he wrote, explaining the decision. “More importantly, I like the idea of our community sharing in the ownership of Figma — and the best way to accomplish this is through public markets.”

Field added that as a public company, investors should “expect us to take big swings,” including through acquisitions. In April Figma bought the assets and team of an unnamed technology company for $14 million, according to the filing.

The IPO will also mark another much-needed win for Silicon Valley venture firms, which are in need of returns after the multi-year slump. Index Ventures is the largest outside shareholder, with a 17% stake before the offering, according to the filing. Greylock owns 16%, Kleiner Perkins controls 14% and Sequoia has a stake of 8.7%.

Figma said it faces “intense competition” and that loss of market share would “adversely affect our business,” but didn’t name any specific competitors.

Over 13 million people use Figma per month, and only one-third of them are designers, according to the filing. In March the company announced Figma Sites, a tool that turns designs into working websites. It’s one of a few new products that diversify the company away from its collaborative service for crafting app and website designs.

As of March 31, Figma had $1.54 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities.

Using its cash, Figma has begun investing in digital currencies. In 2024, Figma’s board authorized a $55 million investment into a Bitwise Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. As of March 31, the holding was worth $69.5 million, according to the filing. In May, the board approved a $30 million investment in Bitcoin, and Figma spent the money on USD Coin, which is a stablecoin.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are leading the deal along with Allen and Co. and JPMorgan Chase.

Correction: A prior version of this story had the incorrect stock exchange in the headline.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

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