Analyst Rishi Jaluria from the Canadian financial giant RBC Capital recently issued a research report, lowering the institution's target price for the global software newcomer Figma (FIG.US) from $65 to $38, while maintaining a "Sector Perform" neutral stock rating. RBC Capital indicated that as North American enterprises' overall IT spending, encompassing various AI application software, enters a significant growth trajectory after experiencing the operational and innovation efficiency gains from AI, companies like Figma that focus on "AI + Design" type applications will propel design workflows into an "AI-native era." The institution believes Figma is currently one of the oversold technical indicator stocks worth buying; therefore, despite the target price reduction, it maintains a neutral stance on the stock. The institution forecasts that 2026 will be a pivotal year for Figma: top-tier software companies prepared for large-scale enterprise AI adoption and penetration will achieve significant revenue and profit growth, while those lagging in the AI wave may struggle under the perception that "AI is making traditional software comprehensively obsolete." RBC Capital analyst Jaluria stated that although Figma's management provided a relatively conservative performance guidance range for early 2026, AI design software spending focused on the global enterprise sector is beginning to stabilize and showing substantial improvement in some sub-sectors, while GenAI continues to drive innovation in design software. In the third quarter of 2025, Figma Inc. achieved a critical growth milestone: its annual revenue run rate record-breakingly surpassed the $1 billion mark, driven by a substantial 38% year-over-year revenue increase to $274.2 million, exceeding Wall Street analysts' consensus expectations. This performance even surpassed the most optimistic upper limit of the company's prior guidance range, largely fueled by the rapid adoption of generative AI-driven design flow software tools like Figma Make. Performance data shows that approximately 30% of high-value customers now use Figma Make software tools weekly, indicating a successful transition towards an AI-native design workflow for this software newcomer. Figma recently also announced a deep collaboration with OpenAI, launching a proprietary Figma AI App for the globally popular AI platform ChatGPT, enabling ChatGPT's hundreds of millions of users to generate high-end design schematics and various chart paradigms within the FigJam software toolset via the conversational AI application. For the fourth quarter, the company's management expects total revenue to be between $292 million and $294 million, and also forecasts full fiscal year 2026 revenue potentially reaching $1.044 billion to $1.046 billion, implying a significant 40% year-over-year growth on a fiscal year basis. What kind of company is Figma, which was nearly acquired by Adobe? Figma is a browser-centric collaborative design software company primarily serving product design and R&D teams, offering an integrated workflow from interface design, prototyping, and design system collaboration to "design handoff to development." Its core monetization model is primarily based on SaaS design software subscriptions, tiered by seat/permission, and offers enterprise clients enhanced security, permissioning, and scalable collaborative design capabilities. When Figma officially listed on the U.S. stock market in July last year, it had been over a year since its acquisition plan with Adobe, the developer of popular creative software like Photoshop and Illustrator, fell through. Figma's core products encompass Figma Design, FigJam, and Dev Mode for engineers; it began public trading on the U.S. stock market on July 31, 2025, under the ticker symbol FIG. The core selling point of the Figma software platform extends beyond "AI-based design workflow" to being a collaborative product development platform: designers are the entry point, subsequently permeating product, engineering, marketing, and operations. From a business scope and product capability perspective, end-to-end workflow is one of Figma's core advantages: completing idea brainstorming, interface design and componentization, prototype validation and animation, to actual delivery workflows for large design projects all within the same platform; the other two major advantages are its industry-leading cross-role collaboration and Figma's exclusive design and development ecosystem. Figma is actively embedding generative AI technology directly into its main business workflows and commercialization system: on one hand, launching/promoting platforms like "Figma Make" for AI-driven design flow generation and automated design product iteration, emphasizing acceleration from idea to usable design/application prototype; on the other hand, incorporating billing/usage mechanisms like "AI credits" into pricing and plans, effectively operating AI application software toolkits based on high-end design flows as scalable, billable additional capabilities. Recently, Figma also released a Figma AI application for ChatGPT, converting conversational ideas into FigJam charts/flowcharts, further integrating "conversational AI generation" into its collaborative scenarios and strengthening its progression towards an "AI-native professional designer workstation" with a robust growth trajectory. The "bullish narrative" for the AI application layer is sweeping global stock markets. For the bullish logic surrounding the global AI application sector, RBC Capital's optimistic outlook on the growth prospects of "AI + Design" application software companies like Figma is undoubtedly a positive signal, "validating the feasibility of the AI application story + preheating potential accelerated growth trends post-2026." Following Google's major launch of the Gemini 3 AI application ecosystem in late November, this cutting-edge software gained immediate global popularity, driving a surge in Google's AI computing demand. The Gemini 3 series products generated immense AI token processing volumes upon release, forcing Google to significantly reduce free access limits for Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro, and impose temporary restrictions even on Pro subscribers, coupled with recent South Korean trade export data showing持续强劲 demand for HBM memory systems and enterprise SSDs, further validating Wall Street's assertion of an "AI application acceleration penetration period and the AI boom still being in the early infrastructure build-out phase with supply struggling to meet demand." As the focus of the global tech stock investment wave covers both AI computing infrastructure and AI application software ends, it continues to significantly boost valuations for AI application companies like Applovin, Trade Desk, Duolingo, and Palantir; future killer generative AI applications for B2B or B2C sectors, and "AI agents" highly likely to substantially boost societal productivity, are expected to explode, explaining the recent capital inflow into software stocks. Previously, cloud computing and search leader Google, AI application leader Applovin focusing on "AI + digital advertising," AI software platform leader Palantir focusing on "AI + data analysis," and Cloudflare positioning itself as the "Connectivity Cloud," have all announced exceptionally strong performance data and future outlooks since 2025. This signifies that not only is demand for AI computing infrastructure, represented by Nvidia AI GPUs, exceptionally strong, but demand for AI software applications, especially enterprise-grade AI software that can comprehensively enhance B2B operational efficiency, is also robust and accelerating penetration across industries. From the current technological trajectory, AI application software development is concentrating on "generative AI applications" and, building on generative AI, the evolution of AI functionality from Q&A chat interfaces towards "AI agents that autonomously execute various tedious and complex tasks." Enterprises' urgent need to improve efficiency and reduce operational costs has recently greatly accelerated the widespread application of two core categories of AI software: generative AI applications and AI agents. Among these, AI agents are highly likely to be the major AI application trend before 2030; their emergence signifies AI evolving from an information assistance tool into a highly intelligent productivity tool. Latest research from MarketsandMarkets shows the AI agent market size could reach as high as $53 billion by 2030, implying a compound annual growth rate starting from 2025 of up to 46%.
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