The first time Danny Rimer laid eyes on Dylan Field, Field was just 18 years old.
Then, Field was an intern at the buzzy startup Flipboard. Field gave a presentation to the startup’s board, self-assuredly outlining his research about the features users loved and which ones flopped. Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures since 2002, remembers it very clearly.
“What was interesting was not only did he do a very good quantitative job of figuring out what features made the most sense, but the way he presented it was incredibly visually appealing and original,” Rimer told Fortune. “I remember him as an 18-year-old and thinking: ‘Wow, this person has a unique, compelling way of conveying information.’”
Rimer met Field again shortly thereafter, as Field was looking to raise a seed round for Figma. It was 2013, and the biggest tech IPO that year was Twitter, and there wasn’t necessarily optimism about design as a market. Field also wasn’t in a rush to put out a product.
“Here was this 19-year-old, who had a lot of clarity about what he wanted to do—democratize the world of design, and provide tools to everyone,” said Rimer, a college art history major who was drawn to Figma’s taste and ambition. “He had this ambition of dropping out of university to go after this crazy idea, where it’s clear that he’s not going to be able to come up with a product for over two years. In the world of move-fast-break-things, here were two folks [Field and Figma cofounder Evan Wallace] who were saying, ‘We’re not going to have anything for two years, so we hope you’re comfortable with that.’”
Rimer—whose investments also include Etsy, Dropbox, Discord, and Dream Games—bit, leading Figma’s 2013 seed round. At the seed, Index invested $1.8 million, and over the next 12 years invested a total of $86.5 million in the company, a source familiar with the matter told Fortune. Index sold roughly 5% of its shares, a sliver of its total stake, in the IPO to create a float, collecting about $66 million. As Figma shares soared on their first day of trading Thursday, Index’s remaining stake in Figma swelled to north of $7 billion. The source told Fortune that the seed multiple by market close on IPO day was 1300% multiple on invested capital—ultimately, an almost 90x return.
Rimer declined to comment on specific numbers. Nevertheless, Figma’s absolute shredding of the public markets goes to show not only that tech IPOs are back, but that the company’s original thesis—that design matters and is expansive—was right all along.
“It was a time when we thought everyone in the world wanted to be a designer,” Rimer said. “Design was sort of what architecture was in the early 20th century, during the Bauhaus movement. Everyone was talking about being a designer of apps, of software, of fashion. It was a term that became synonymous with the future. So, we thought design meant a lot more than just designing software or graphic design, that it would be an all-encompassing term. And that probably meant most people would want to try out their chops at designing.”
It’s why Rimer and the Index team—also backers in two of the venture capital success stories of this year, Wiz’s $32 billion mega-sale to Google and ServiceTitan’s IPO—don’t subscribe to the much-quoted total addressable market (or TAM) metric. Chasing an exact TAM can be misleading, Rimer said.
“We learned a long time ago to think of the total available market as noise, and we’re probably going to get it wrong,” he said. “An example: We invested in Etsy, while most folks were thinking: How big can Etsy be? How many Sunday crafts people are there going to be in the world? 100,000? 200,000? And we said, this is actually a phenomenon. Everyone wants to make their passion their vocation. We could have millions of these folks. Conversely, we passed on Airbnb because we were thinking, how many hotel rooms they can cannibalize, instead of thinking Airbnb is actually going to expand the market dramatically again.”
Figma amid the AI boom, Rimer said, is a full-circle moment of sorts, as AI creates more vibe designers in the way it has created vibe coders.
“We did not predict that AI was going to create another exponential curve of opportunity for Figma,” Rimer said. “We already thought that the number and the speed of apps and software being created pre-AI was already really compelling. But, of course, AI has lowered the bar for anyone to create an app, and anyone to be a developer. So, the core necessity of design has only become more central for a much larger pool of people.”
The intern with the thoughtful slides had it right all along: Design wasn’t peripheral. It was fundamental.
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Venture Deals
- Anaconda, an Austin-based AI operating system, raised $150 million in Series C funding. Insight Partners led the round and was joined by Mubadala Capital.
- fal, a San Francisco-based generative media infrastructure platform, raised $125 million in Series C funding from Salesforce Ventures, Shopify Ventures, Google AI Futures Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, and others.
- Carbyne, a New York City-based provider of cloud-native emergency communications and response solutions, raised $100 million in funding from AT&T Ventures, Axon Enterprise, Cox Enterprises, Global Medical Response, Hanaco Growth, Hercules Capital, and others.
- SAFE, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based CyberAGI company, raised $70 million in Series C funding. Avataar Ventures led the round and was joined by SIG Venture Capital, NextEquity Partners, Prosperity7 Ventures, and existing investors.
- QI Tech, a São Paulo-based financial infrastructure company, raised $63 million in a Series B extension. General Atlantic led the round.
- Good Job Games, an Istanbul, Turkey-based mobile games company, raised $60 million in Series A funding. Menlo Ventures and Anthos Capital led the round and were joined by Bessemer Venture Partners.
- Wallarm, a San Francisco-based API and agentic AI security platform, raised $55 million in Series C funding. Toba Capital led the round.
- Augmodo, a Seattle-based developer of spatial AI technology for inventory and task tracking, raised $37.5 million in Series A funding. TQ Ventures led the round and was joined by Arena Holdings, the family office of Tony James, and others.
- Cline, a San Francisco-based developer of an AI coding agent, raised $32 million in seed and Series A funding. Emergence Capital led the Series A round and was joined by Pace Capital, 1984 Ventures, Essence VC, Cox Exponential, and others.
- Stable, a New York City-based layer 1 blockchain network powered by USDT and designed to achieve seamless financial transactions through stablecoins, raised $28 million in seed funding. Bitfinex & Hack VC led the round and was joined by Franklin Templeton, Castle Island Ventures, eGirl Capital, Bybit-Mirana, and others.
- Sava, a London, U.K.-based preventative health company, raised $19 million in Series A funding. Balderton Capital and Pentland Ventures led the round and were joined by Norrsken VC and JamJar Investments.
- Knit, an Austin-based AI-powered platform for consumer market research, raised $16.1 million in Series A funding. Sound Ventures and GFT Ventures led the round and were joined by Silicon Road Ventures, Osage Ventures, Rise of the Rest, and others.
- Deep Cogito, a San Francisco-based superintelligence company, raised $13 million in seed funding. Benchmark led the round.
- Planted Solar, an Oakland, Calif.-based solar deployment platform, raised $12 million from Piva Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Team Builder Ventures.
- TACEO, a Graz, Austria-based developer of infrastructure for secure computation on encrypted data, raised $5.5 million in seed funding. Archetype VC led the round and was joined by a16z CSX, Cyber.Fund, A.Capital Ventures, Polymorphic, and angel investors.
Private Equity
- Hoffman Family of Companies acquired Atlanta Party Rentals, an Atlanta-based event rental services company. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Exits
- Midland Industries, a portfolio company of Gemspring Capital, acquired Cerro Brass, a St. Louis-based distributor of brass components, from Cerro Flow Products, a subsidiary of Marmon Holdings. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Funds + Funds of Funds
- Silversmith Capital Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm, raised $1.7 billion for its fifth fund focused on technology and health care businesses.
- Frazier Life Sciences, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm, raised $1.3 billion in its 12th fund focused on biopharmaceutical companies.
