Figma’s top VCs are sitting on $24 billion worth of stock after massive IPO pop
Figma Inc. signage during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Thursday, July 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
You can almost smell the bubbly wafting across Silicon Valley.
Following Figma’s blockbuster market debut on Thursday, four of the most iconic names in venture capital — Index Ventures, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia — are collectively sitting on roughly $24 billion worth of the design software vendor’s stock.
Until recently, there’s been little reason to celebrate. From late 2021, when soaring inflation and rising rates pushed investors out of risky assets, until the middle of 2025, tech IPOs were few and far between, and many of the companies that managed to make it out failed to impress Wall Street. That’s left venture firms with scarce returns for the pension funds, endowments and foundations they rely on for funding.
The mood is noticeably brighter these days as the Nasdaq trades near a record.
Figma is the latest, and perhaps most high-profile, tech company to hit the market, and Wall Street appears to want more. After raising its price range this week and then pricing $1 above the top of that range, Figma shares soared 250% in their first day on the New York Stock Exchange.
Investors will admit they got lucky. Figma was supposed to get acquired for $20 billion by Adobe, an agreement the two companies forged in 2022. But the following year, the transaction collapsed after U.K. regulators said the tie-up would harm competition.
Figma is now worth more than three times what Adobe was going to pay, closing on Thursday with a market cap of almost $68 billion.
CEO Dylan Field, who co-founded the company in 2012, owns a stake worth over $6 billion. Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures and Figma board member, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that the failed acquisition came with “intense pressure and a spotlight few founders ever face.”
“Dylan remained his usual grounded, transparent self,” wrote Rimer, whose firm first bet on Figma in 2013 and is the biggest shareholder, with $7.2 billion worth of stock in the company. “When the deal fell through a year later, he didn’t flinch. He turned the page and got right back to building.”
Figma’s offering raised $1.2 billion, with two-thirds of the proceeds going to existing investors. Other than the small slug of stock each of the venture firms sold at $33, the rest of their holdings are subject to a lock-up period, meaning all of the current value is currently just on paper. The vast majority of outstanding shares are locked up for 180 days, so big stock sales can’t happen until January.
Stablecoin issuer Circle went public in June, and is the other tech IPO that’s generated hefty returns for VCs recently. The shares were initially sold at $31 each and are now trading at over $183, leaving investment firms IDG Capital, General Catalyst, Accel and Breyer Capital with a combined stake of close to $12 billion. Circle doubled on its first day of trading.
While IPO pops generate a lot of buzz and dramatically lift the value of investors’ holdings, they’re not universally celebrated. Bill Gurley of Benchmark has for years been a critic of such first-day gains, arguing that bankers leave money on the table for the company while handing deeply discounted stock to new investors.
In a series of posts on X on Thursday, Gurley described the Figma outcome as “expected & fully intentional.”
“Who benefits?” Gurley wrote, shortly after the stock began trading. “The large clients of the investment banks (who return the favor paying for other services). They bought it at $33 last night and can sell it today for over $90.”
Return of the exits
Still, the exuberance in the market is welcome news for most VCs.
After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, every year since has been relatively dismal, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.
The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.
Earlier this year, the exit environment was still looking ominous. After President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs in April, companies including online lender Klarna and ticket marketplace StubHub delayed their IPO plans. The Nasdaq plummeted 10% in a week, as investors fretted over the potential of rising import costs and supply chain disruptions.
But Trump later walked back his threats and the trade deals he’s landed have resulted in lower tariffs than previously feared.
Brannin McBee, Chief Development Officer and Co-founder of CoreWeave, Mike Intrator, Chief Executive Officer and founder of CoreWeave, Peter Salanki, Chief Technology Officer of CoreWeave, and Brian Venturo, Chief Strategy Officer and founder of CoreWeave, pose for photos during the company’s Initial Public Offering(IPO) at the Nasdaq headquarters on March 28, 2025 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, went public just before Trump’s initial plans were announced. The stock is now almost triple its IPO price, closing on Thursday at $114.13, though that’s down about 38% from its high in June.
CoreWeave and Circle have both been big wins for investors, with their market caps now at about $56 billion and $41 billion, respectively. Figma is worth even more.
Lynn Martin, president of the NYSE, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Thursday that she thinks the Figma offering “will open the floodgates.”
Figma’s early investors and big financial winners all published glowing blog posts about Field and the journey he’s been on with the company that he started after dropping out of college in 2012.
“Figma’s relentless focus on product, community, and craft has reshaped how the world designs,” wrote Greylock’s John Lilly in a post on Thursday. His firm led the $14 Series AI investment in 2015 and now owns a stake worth about $6.7 billion.
Kleiner Perkins led the $25 Series B, which was announced in 2018. Its holdings are now valued at $6 billion.
“The product was still early, but the love from its small community of users was unmistakable,” wrote Kleiner partner Mamoon Hamid, in his post after the IPO. “We were convinced that Figma had the potential to fundamentally reshape how digital products would be designed, and knew we had to be part of it.”
Two years later, venture powerhouse Sequoia stepped in to lead Figma’s $40 million Series C round. Sequoia’s Andrew Reed wrote at the time that the company had “the talent and culture to build an enduring, fundamental company.”
On Thursday, with his firm’s stake in Figma approaching $3.8 billion, Reed took to X for his congratulatory remarks.
“Congrats to the incredible @Figma team,” Reed wrote. “The most creative, determined, imaginative, and positive group of people. I’m just so happy for all of your success.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
A screen showing the price of various cryptocurrencies against the US dollar displayed at a Crypto Panda cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025.
Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The crypto market slid Friday after President Donald Trump unveiled his modified “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries.
The price of bitcoin showed relative strength, hovering at the flat line while ether, XRP and Binance Coin fell 2% each. Overnight, bitcoin dropped to a low of $114,110.73.
The descent triggered a wave of long liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, pushing prices lower. Bitcoin saw $172 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and ether saw $210 million.
Crypto-linked stocks suffered deeper losses. Coinbase led the way, down 15% following its disappointing second-quarter earnings report. Circle fell 4%, Galaxy Digital lost 2%, and ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion was down 8%. Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy was down by 5%.
Bitcoin falls below $115,000
The stock moves came amid a new wave of risk off sentiment after President Trump issued new tariffs ranging between 10% and 41%, triggering worries about increasing inflation and the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. In periods of broad based derisking, crypto tends to get hit as investors pull out of the most speculative and volatile assets. Technical resilience and institutional demand for bitcoin and ether are helping support their prices.
“After running red hot in July, this is a healthy strategic cooldown. Markets aren’t reacting to a crisis, they’re responding to the lack of one,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “With no new macro catalyst on the horizon, capital is rotating out of speculative assets and into safer ground … it’s a calculated pause.”
Crypto is coming off a winning month but could soon hit the brakes amid the new macro uncertainty, and in a month usually characterized by lower trading volumes and increased volatility. Bitcoin gained 8% in July, according to Coin Metrics, while ether surged more than 49%.
Ether ETFs saw more than $5 billion in inflows in July alone (with just a single day of outflows of $1.8 million on July 2), bringing it’s total cumulative inflows to $9.64 to date. Bitcoin ETFs saw $114 million in outflows in the final trading session of July, bringing its monthly inflows to about $6 billion out of a cumulative $55 billion.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google has purged more than 50 organizations related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, from a list of organizations that the tech company provides funding to, according to a new report.
The company has removed a total of 214 groups from its funding list while adding 101, according to a new report from tech watchdog organization The Tech Transparency Project. The watchdog group cites the most recent public list of organizations that receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team.
The largest category of purged groups were DEI-related, with a total of 58 groups removed from Google’s funding list, TTP found. The dropped groups had mission statements that included the words “diversity, “equity,” “inclusion,” or “race,” “activism,” and “women.” Those are also terms the Trump administration officials have reportedly told federal agencies to limit or avoid.
In response to the report, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told CNBC that the list reflects contributions made in 2024 and that it does not reflect all contributions made by other teams within the company.
“We contribute to hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum that advocate for pro-innovation policies, and those groups change from year to year based on where our contributions will have the most impact,” Castañeda said in an email.
Organizations that were removed from Google’s list include the African American Community Service Agency, which seeks to “empower all Black and historically excluded communities”; the Latino Leadership Alliance, which is dedicated to “race equity affecting the Latino community”; and Enroot, which creates out-of-school experiences for immigrant kids.
The organization funding purge is the latest to come as Google began backtracking some of its commitments to DEI over the last couple of years. That pull back came due to cost cutting to prioritize investments into artificial intelligence technology as well as the changing political and legal landscape amid increasing national anti-DEI policies.
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color — demographics that have historically been overlooked in the workplace.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action at colleges led to additional backlash against DEI programs in conservative circles.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order upon taking office in January to end the government’s DEI programs and directed federal agencies to combat what the administration considers “illegal” private-sector DEI mandates, policies and programs. Shortly after, Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.
Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, many companies are continuing the work but using different language or rolling the efforts under less-charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”
Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintained the importance diversity plays in its workforce at an all-hands meeting in March.
“We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity,” Pichai said at the time.
One of the groups dropped from Google’s contributions list is the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which provides training, assistance, and public awareness campaigns on the issue of violence against women, the TTP report found. The group had been on Google’s list of funded organizations for at least nine years and continues to name the company as one of its corporate partners.
Google said it still gave $75,000 to the National Network to End Domestic Violence in 2024 but did not say why the group was removed from the public contributions list.
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