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Figma CEO on failed Adobe deal, startup landscape, big redesign with AI

As design firm Figma rolls out its first major AI upgrade for its platform, CEO and co-founder Dylan Field is taking no chances with customers amid steep AI adoption and demand curves and consumer hype. Figma is paying the cost of the AI upgrade for now instead of attempting to charge customers.

“We’re gonna eat the cost for 2024, because we don’t know how people are going to use the features yet. We don’t know how many of you will care, we don’t know how good they get,” Field said in an interview with CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa on Thursday speaking from the company’s Config conference. “Watch what the usage is in the beta, see what the costs are, and then you can go from there in terms of figuring out where pricing should be.” 

Figma’s UI3 redesign, released in limited beta on June 26 with a waitlist for additional users, includes a new toolbox called “Figma AI.”

Roughly six months after antitrust scrutiny forced Adobe to call off its acquisition of Figma, the redesign that widely integrates AI functionality is another competitive wedge in a battle with Adobe and the other highly valued design startup, Canva, which has been moving more into the enterprise market, with a valuation around $25 million.

Canva ranked No. 6 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, while Figma ranked No. 26.

The fast growth of Figma’s all-in-one product design functions accessed over a browser has become competitive with Adobe’s lineup. This core innovation by Figma, akin to how Google Docs are shared and revised, takes the place of designers working in silos on desktop apps while struggling to keep track of various file versions. Canva, known for its easy-to-use software tools, continues to scale up, going after business accounts, integrating AI, and competing more aggressively with Adobe.

In a blog post this week, Figma stressed a focus on technology that meets user needs what users need, rather than tossing out trendy ideas, including AI implementations, like chat box functions. “There’s a risk of these features feeling tacked on and distracting from what matters,” a group of top executives at the company wrote.

“What we care about is making sure we’re not just sprinkling AI fairy dust on top but rather really baking AI functionality into the product in order to make a designer’s life better,” Field told CNBC. 

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“It definitely feels like a race to me,” Field said, referencing the AI model industry, whose customers include web companies rapidly adopting AI features. Adoption of the most consumer-desired AI features to beat out similar companies for market share may also be a race, he said. Figma is feeling the AI heat.

“It’s all about, as an individual company, how do we build for our audience, which is people making products,” Field said. 

In June, Adobe shares surged the most since the Covid bull market of 2020 after better-than-expected financial results and the integration of AI into its product, Firefly, and its Enterprise business platform.

“The only thing constant is change,” Field told CNBC. As the large language models from Amazon and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, among others including Meta, get faster, “prices are decreasing,” he added.  

Figma’s UI3 incorporates various generative AI features to streamline and standardize creative processes from page and app ideation through execution. Typing in directives for a page can generate aesthetics and prompt design ideas. It also streamlined design for Figjam, its original AI-powered workspace that generates agendas and allows for web design teamwork. A new product called “Figma Slides” is a potential competitor to Google Slides and Canva. Figma’s design tools are embedded in enterprise offerings from companies including Google and Oracle.  

The AI competition is another step on the path to a potential IPO for Figma after the thwarted Adobe deal. In May, Figma announced a tender offer to allow current and former employees to sell shares at a $12.5 billion valuation, with the valuation up 25% from a 2021 fundraising but well below Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition offer. Canva also recently completed a transaction to allow early employees and investors to cash out at a $26 billion valuation — well below its peak private value of $40 billion. Like Figma, it’s also a highly anticipated IPO candidate.

“Either it’s M&A or IPO and we tried one of those, so you can probably guess as to the one that will be in our future,” Field said. 

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters

Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.

Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.

“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.

This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.

Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.

The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.

In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all. 

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in $2.4 billion licensing deal

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in .4 billion licensing deal

In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.

Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP

Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.

Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.

OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.

“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”

Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.

Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.

“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”

Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.

“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.

WATCH: Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

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Musk’s xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok’s ‘horrific’ antisemitic posts

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Musk's xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok's 'horrific' antisemitic posts

The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024. 

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.

xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.

“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.

X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.

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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.

“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.

Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”

xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.

Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.

CNBC’s April Roach contributed to this article.

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