Design tools feel AI pressure

Figma came public at $33 a share on July 30, 2025, and by April 9, 2026, the stock had traded down to $19.60, a fresh 52-week low that cut its market value to about $8.5 billion. (investor.figma.com) (marketbeat.com) Adobe has been hit too: Adobe shares closed at $225.35 on April 10, 2026, and Yahoo Finance’s market summary showed the stock down 36.1% over the prior year. (finance.yahoo.com) That selloff is not happening because design software stopped making money. Adobe reported $6.40 billion in first-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue on March 12, 2026, up 12% from a year earlier, and said its artificial-intelligence-first annual recurring revenue had more than tripled year over year. (adobe.com) Figma is still growing too. In its February 18, 2026 investor materials, Figma listed fourth-quarter 2025 results, and MarketBeat’s recap of that report said quarterly revenue reached $303.78 million, up 40.1% from a year earlier. (investor.figma.com) (marketbeat.com) What changed is the market’s picture of the moat. For years, Adobe and Figma looked like toll booths on the road to making digital images, ads, prototypes, and app screens; now investors are watching image generators, code assistants, and chat tools turn parts of that work into features that can be bundled almost anywhere. (adobe.com) (investor.figma.com) That pressure lands hardest at the low end. Adobe’s own March 2026 results said Firefly subscriptions and credit packs were growing fast, but outside summaries of the quarter also noted that freemium adoption was pressuring near-term conversion, which is another way of saying more users are trying artificial intelligence tools before paying full freight. (adobe.com) (marketbeat.com) Figma has a second problem that Adobe does not: it was priced like a rare growth asset from the minute it listed. Its initial public offering sold 36,937,080 shares at $33, and that price came less than two years after Adobe had agreed to buy the company in a deal valued at about $20 billion before regulators killed it in December 2023. (investor.figma.com) (news.adobe.com) Once that takeover premium disappeared, public investors had to decide what Figma was worth as a standalone company in a market where artificial intelligence can draft screens, rewrite copy, and generate front-end code. Figma itself has leaned into that shift, with investor materials in April 2026 describing the company as an “AI-powered platform” and recent product posts about agents, Codex, and building user interfaces from the canvas. (investor.figma.com) Adobe is making the same argument from the opposite direction. The company says Firefly, Acrobat artificial intelligence features, and enterprise tools are expanding quickly, but the stock is still being marked down because Wall Street is asking whether artificial intelligence will raise Adobe’s revenue faster than it lowers the price people are willing to pay for creative work. (adobe.com) (finance.yahoo.com) That is why both stocks can fall while both companies post solid numbers. Investors are not grading last quarter’s sales; they are trying to price a future where the old design suite may matter less than who owns the fastest artificial intelligence layer on top of it. (adobe.com) (investor.figma.com)