Joe Coletti
Welcome to Innovators and Ideas, an audio series from RBC Capital Markets, where we engage with the visionary leaders shaping the future of their sector. I'm your host, Joe Coletti. Today we're at RBC’s Global Technology, Internet, Media and Telecom conference in New York, and I'm speaking with Praveer Melwani, CFO of Figma, a company redefining how teams collaborate to design, build and ship products.
Praveer, thanks for being with us.
Praveer Melwani
Really good to be here. Thanks for having me.
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Joe Coletti
So, the design ecosystem has undergone a massive transformation in the last five years, with Figma often being described as the category creator. From your vantage point as CFO, what does it take in to sustain that growth that the company's had, and how do you think about evolving the business, especially right now, in a market that's just moving so quickly?
Praveer Melwani
I appreciate the way that you're defining us, but I think, candidly, it's been something that's been evolving. If you look at the history of Figma, I think we were the first to think about how you can create a design tool in the browser. When we first brought this idea, our customers were, were looking at us with squinty eyes and scratching their head, but we stayed steadfast to it. And I think, what then came from it was, all the magic of having a browser-based tool you get, you walk in, you know exactly what the file is that you should be jumping into, collaboration, is kind of built out of the box. And, what we were realizing, and our customer were realizing as well is, design is a challenge that was not necessarily going to be solved by one individual, but rather, it's the true collaborative nature of design that was going to allow companies to differentiate. There's been a whole host of different companies over time that have come in and out of the space. I think what we have seen the importance in is having a platform approach in terms of the products that we're serving and that we're bringing. We empower teams to go from idea all the way through to now-shipped product, all on a singular platform. And what we've been, increasingly focused on, is this desire and appetite to experiment. We doubled our product portfolio in May of this year. We have a proven ability and desire to disrupt ourselves, there's so many different ways that you can now go from idea to shipped product, and, we've introduced different form factors to do that a product like Figma Make, which allows you, through natural language, to describe the interaction that you'd like, versus what was a traditional way of prototyping. I think we naturally need to give these projects room to breathe, but we need to ensure that we're measuring the right things throughout. So, it's really important to me in my seat to have a hypothesis, be able to test and iterate on that hypothesis and then move nimbly and quickly where necessary.
Joe Coletti
So now you mentioned the AI a little bit there, and we'll talk a lot about that and the impact that it's having, not just with your company, but beyond. So, if we talk about as companies across every sector really become more software-defined, where do you see the biggest opportunities for design-led thinking to unlock value, particularly as AI continues to reshape enterprise workflows and also user expectations.
Praveer Melwani
I think the fun thing here to realize is that all companies are, now have a digital front door in some way. You know, is one of the things that I got I didn't fully realize when I was first joining Figma about eight and a half years ago. But the reality is that, gone are the days that, I'm in a bank branch much more often, I'm pulling up the application on my phone. And I think, if that's then true, what it means is more and more companies are going to need to make sure that they're investing in the design process. We've actually seen that in our customer base, about 78% of the Forbes level 2000 are already using Figma. About 85% of our weekly active users sit outside of the States. About 50/50 revenue split between the US and International. But what we have increasingly been focused on, is educating more and more folks that, if this is the reality of how they win. And, craft point of view, are going to be so much more important over time that, they need a platform like Figma in order to take their process to that next level.
Joe Coletti
So how are you guys right now thinking about the potential of AI specifically around productivity, but not just for end users, but also how it's sort of influencing operating leverage, business efficiency, and, importantly, long term financial performance.
Praveer Melwani
Maybe I'll take the you know, how is it impacting our product? First, we've got a whole suite of different AI features from things that can help you reduce tedium in your workflows, things like removing backgrounds and renaming your layers all the way through to some of our flagship products that we launched earlier this year in Figma Make, which allows you to describe a application through natural language and have that render with full code, behind the seats there. What we what it's what's ultimately doing is both lowering the floor, allowing more folks to participate in the design process, while also then raising the ceiling, allowing our power users to get that much more out of the platform. And this story is now resonating with our customers. What a product like Figma Make is able to do is empower a PM, a user researcher within an organization to not necessarily need to lean on a designer or developer as their hand, but rather communicate their idea and get that idea out in front of folks much more quickly. It's led, for our customers, a faster speed of iteration, a quicker feedback loop. And largely that means that they're building better products for their end users. For Figma itself, and from a business efficiency perspective that we see internally, it's changed the way we talk about planning from the very beginning parts of it. So, we just are stepping out of our ‘26 planning efforts. And so much of the discussion that I've been having with our leaders has less been around, Where do I need additional people in order to augment a task or workflow? But much more around, Hey, describe to me the process, infrastructure and tooling that you're using before we go and greenlight an additional resource, or head count in order to get that done. So today, it's taking the form of how we're actually being able to work through our support queue, and how we're able to deflect tickets in a much more thoughtful way, how, on the engineering side, are we using and augmenting what our engineers are able to output through third party coding tools. What I've had the viewpoint on is being willing to invest in these in these pilots and experiment. I think the pace of innovation here is fairly rapid, and if you sit on your hands and hope for it to come to you, you're probably going to put yourself on the back foot. And then lastly, I think a willingness to invest in the in the learning and development of how to use these tools across the company is increasingly more valuable. Because, what you don't want is a workforce that's trained on the tools of yesteryear, but rather, what is the tools that they should be using today?
Joe Coletti
I want to pivot to your acquisition of Weevi, where I think we're seeing a convergence of creation, collaboration and communication. In your view, how do you see AI accelerating that convergence, and what do you think it means for product strategy and monetization going forward?
Praveer Melwani
We're really excited about the folks at Weevi that just recently joined us. Weevi, for those who are unfamiliar, it's a company that hasn't been around for too long. It's about, it's about a year old, but the founders have years and years of experience in in VX, VFX tooling, and asset generation for some time now. Weevi sits at the intersection of brand and product design. They build an entirely new way of working that brings together generative AI models and editing tools. And it's actually pretty fun to watch people work within the tool. Folks come in to put this discovery process in mind. They create some pretty amazing pipelines for assets that are actually now powering some very large fortune 100 companies. More broadly, what we've seen is, AI is creating more generalists, more folks are being able to broaden, be brought into the process. We talked about Figma make and what it can do to bring your PMS, your user researchers, to be able to participate. And the way that we're thinking about it from a monetization perspective is that we think that there's going to be a mix of bundles where you get an embedded number of credits depending on the seat type that you're on, to allow folks to experience some of the magic here. And then we believe that there's a world where we will augment that embedded credit model with a add-on model, where you will then have the ability, if you're a power user, to purchase additional credits in order to continue to get the task done at hand. We want to provide people some flexibility, so we may, kind of, iterate on the models that we use there. So you can imagine a pay as you go offering that sit next to the add-on offering. But experimentation is very much in our future here as we try to land on the right thing for our customers.
Joe Coletti
So, you've touched on this a little bit, but I wanted to zoom out a little bit more and have you go a little deeper. How do you see AI shifting the way design engineering and product teams continue to work together moving forward? And how do you think that is going to reshape and maybe even redefine the value prop for platforms like Figma over time?
Praveer Melwani
Figma has become the system of record for design and product development. It's where people are pulling the context that they need. And it almost becomes the sole resource that folks are going back to as they're as they're debating things. So, what we're focused now on is, how do we provide that context in the right tools for folks, so that they consume they can consume it at the right moment. So you take our MCP server that we rolled out earlier this year, and what that MCP server allows folks to do is, if you are a developer sitting in the context of your agentic coding solution, and you want to be able to pull out the Figma context so that you can go and create the front end within your code base, you can do that by leveraging our MCP server, and we'll pass to you that front end context. What that actually does is, on the company side, the responsibilities of actual of what traditionally was a front end development tasks are now actually getting blurred. And more and more folks within an organization, or a developer organization specifically, are now undertaking those front end development tasks. What that means for us is we have the opportunity to sell wider within these organizations, because you're seeing more generalists start to emerge, and then also, have a much more powerful output as a result. Similarly, Figma make allows us to have a similar impact for PMs. Because what we're able to do is leverage your design system, which you can think about is, the core basic building blocks that, they're your buttons, your styles, your topography, that you actually go and create an application with. And if you can render those core building blocks in the application that you're generating, you end up with a much more realistic output that that leads to, leads to better outcomes and better feedback from your customers.
Joe Coletti
Excellent. I want to talk about what you see as those opportunities that you think will drive long-term strategic value for Figma. And when I talk about that, I say, you know, how do you think AI is informing your view on sort of platform, partnerships, how you expand your ecosystem, or even potential future acquisitions?
Praveer Melwani
Yeah, it's definitely given us a lot of opportunity to experiment. As recently as a couple of months ago, we announced a partnership with the, with the team at open AI, as they were embedding a FigJam app in the context of chat GPT. So you can, you can prompt your way to a diagram, a Gantt chart, whatever, a flow chart, whatever it may be, and then double click over to FigJam. And actually elevate the craft of what you've created. You can save it down, manipulate whatever, whatever you need to do. It's actually pretty interesting to see how the design process is starting in different places. And we need to make sure that we're very quickly moving and coming back to places that are meeting users where they're at. And, I think there's no shortage of new ideas over here, and what we, what I think is the most important here, is to remain nimble and give yourself the flexibility to experiment throughout it.
Joe Coletti
So, I talk about your leadership and your executive team's leadership for a second, you've really helped lead Figma through a period of pretty remarkable evolution. What have you learned about scaling a culture that supports the type of creativity, technical excellence and commercial outcomes that you guys really strive for on a day-to-day basis?
Praveer Melwani
I think the thing that stands out to me, it starts at the top. It starts with your founder, and I think Dylan's an extremely curious individual at his core. He's very first-principled. He makes sure that we don't take anything without actually really pushing on it. At Figma, we're crafts people at our core, we very much care for the product that we've built, but then also the process by which we're creating that. We attract a group of people to the company that are very creative in their own right. It's almost this group of humble overachievers, to a degree that are very much excited to win, but are not necessarily stepping on each other's toes in order to get to the top there. And it fosters this, this atmosphere of wanting to innovate together versus innovate on top of one another. Our customers are also looking to us for how they can leverage our tools to define their future and their future pace of product development at their companies. It necessitates us to be storytellers, really kind of pushing the frontier over here. And then, if we do that right, should pair well with wider deployments and deeper engagements as well.
Joe Coletti
So I want to close with one question thinking ahead a little bit. Our global research team has recently released their latest RBC Imagine report, The Great Recalibration, which talks about the forces of exponential change, reshaping industries, economies and societies. Looking ahead over the next three to five years, what emerging technologies or systemic shifts do you think could have the biggest impact on how creative work is funded, but also delivered and valued?
Praveer Melwani
I actually would love to flip the question a little bit and talk about how I think it's changing even today. I think AI has made it much more simple for folks to create software, generally. You know, we at Figma believe there's going to be a near vertical line and the amount of software that's being created. I think the value will really start to accrue to the top end of the stack over there. So, design, craft point of view, is how I believe companies will win. So, what we think is really important is to provide people the tooling to work through that idea maze much more quickly. And we're doing that through the platform that we've already put together with speed of delivery and learning being the most important things as part of that especially with a larger and larger share of folks within an organization being able to participate in the process. You want to provide folks with the consistency they need. So, it's these platform tools that are systems of record in nature, especially in this AI-native wave, that are going to be the ones that stand out and win.
Joe Coletti
Praveer, I really want to thank you for being with us today, taking time out of your schedule here at the conference. It was a really interesting conversation, and good luck with the rest of your meetings.
Praveer Melwani
Yeah, thanks for having me. Really appreciate you guys.
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Joe Coletti
Thanks for listening to Innovators and Ideas, brought to you by RBC Capital Markets. This episode was recorded on November 18, 2025. Subscribe now to get insights delivered straight to your inbox on the economy, markets and industry trends at rbccm.com/insights. See you all next time.
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