Figma’s Big Bet: Dropping Anchor In ‘Inevitable’ India

It’s impossible for any tech company to overlook a 5 Mn-strong talent pool fed by more than 1.5 Mn engineering graduates passing out every year. Figma was no exception to home in on India’s rich resources and toe the line of AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic to enterprise software major SAP.

The San Francisco–based design software giant that went public earlier this year, has just rolled out its first physical office in Bengaluru. In fact, India is Figma’s largest market outside the US, both in terms of weekly and monthly active users.

The decision was driven by the scale of adoption and the strength of the design community in the region. India now produces more than 35 Mn design files annually on Figma, which includes millions of ideas, products, and prototypes created across startups, agencies, and large enterprises. Adoption has also deepened among corporate users, with 40% of the BSE 100 companies using Figma’s platform, the company claimed.

Figma has announced open positions in sales, marketing, and engineering. Although it has not disclosed the size of the new facility or its planned headcount, it said that local hiring will continue into 2026.

The ‘Inevitable’ India Foray

The decision to open an India office wasn’t made this year; in many ways it was inevitable. And it mirrors the journey of other global giants who have looked to add to their presence in India, most notably, the likes of Canva and Adobe, which are compete with Figma directly.

The India entry been in the making for at least three years, according to Scott Pugh, who is the vice-president of sales for the company’s Asia-Pacific wing.

“Even before I joined, I believed India would be one of our biggest international markets. It’s something I’ve been planning for since day one, and the timing now just feels right, with customer demand, scale of adoption, and the community’s doubling in the past one year,” Pugh told Inc42.

For Figma, the choice of India isn’t about numbers alone, it’s as much about maturity as well. Indian teams aren’t merely adopting Figma, they’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on the platform.

“The maturity of design and engineering teams here is remarkable. They’re building plugins, experimenting with workflows: we’re actually learning from our Indian customers on how to improve Figma for everyone globally,” he said.

It’s the feedback loop that convinced Figma to plant deeper roots. India is now not just a key user base, but also an innovation driver for the company’s global roadmap.

India ranks 38th among the 139 economies featured in the Global Innovation Index 2025. It ranks 36th for frontier technology readiness and is a top performer in areas like AI research and development.

With the median age of the population hovering at 28.8 years, India has the demographic sweet spot in building its pool of graduates with a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) background.

And this demographic will be a core target for Figma, particularly, given its community-centric engagement strategy.

‘Friends Of Figma’ In India

For now, Figma plans to make the India office a go-to-market facility, with hiring underway across sales, marketing, and customer care functions. The company is also introducing designer and developer advocacy roles to deepen its connection with the local community.

“We’re hiring advocates, evangelists who work with our community and customers to help improve their design and product processes,” Pugh said. “It’s about learning from the market while helping it scale.”

This community-first approach mirrors Figma’s DNA. The company’s ‘Friends of Figma’ network has doubled in size in the past year, signaling deep grassroot-level engagement. India’s tech blend of startups, digital natives, IT companies, and conglomerates gives Figma a broad canvas to work with – from early-stage founders designing their first interface to enterprises modernising legacy design systems.

The India blueprint is far more than a market expansion strategy for Figma. A recent skill-gap study across 23 countries revealed an alarming shortfall of 83 Mn workers, which could inject an extraordinary $11.5 Tn into the global GDP by 2028, when bridged. India is significant in this, with its hybrid base of designers, developers, and product managers building up a cross-functional ecosystem that aligns with Figma’s product vision of unifying design and development.

“The lines between roles are blurring. Designers are using tools to generate usable code, while engineers are engaging more deeply in UI and user experience. India is leading the way in this convergence,” the Apac sales chief at Figma.

While Figma hasn’t disclosed revenue by geography, over 50% of its total revenue now comes from international markets, underscoring how critical non-US regions have become to its business.

Not Replicating; Rewriting India Game

Beyond people and community, Figma looks at infrastructure and ecosystem partnerships. Pugh added that the company is exploring data localisation for India – similar to what it did in Europe after the GDPR.

Figma’s India push isn’t a copy-paste of its global playbook, rather it’s a deliberate calibration to the way Indian product teams operate. The company’s GTM office is less about selling software and more about embedding itself into how India builds digital products, Figma’s vice-president of engineering, Abhishek Mathur, told the media.

From startups like Cars24 and Swiggy to conglomerates such as Reliance and TCS, design workflows in India are increasingly blending with engineering and AI. And that’s exactly where Figma wants to be – at the intersection of design, code, and collaboration.

Through its new advocacy roles, Figma is investing in a local layer of design evangelists, including practitioners who don’t just sell tools, but shape how teams think about design systems, code connect, and now, AI-native workflows.

The bet is that as Indian firms mature from design adoption to design-led strategy, Figma becomes the glue holding together designers, PMs, and engineers across use cases. “Indian teams aren’t just using Figma, they’re redefining what product collaboration looks like. We’re seeing customers here build on Figma’s developer tools faster than anywhere else,” Mathur said.

Betting Big On India’s Hybrid Builders

Figma’s under-the-hood strategy for India may come from its AI layer and the willingness to push it. Tools like FigJam AI and Figma Make have started converting text prompts to prototypes, and prototypes to working front-end code, Mathur said.

At Cars24, for instance, the design team uses Figma Make to co-create interfaces with business teams in real time. “Earlier, we’d get 10-page requirement docs,” said Cars24’s Akshit Malhotra. “Now, they just generate mockups directly in Figma. It’s changed how we collaborate.”

This democratisation of design, moving it from a specialised skill to a shared language between teams, is exactly the cultural shift Figma wants to accelerate in India, according to Mathur. It aligns perfectly with India’s emerging developer economy, where AI copilots, no-code tools, and design automation are converging rapidly.

Figma’s big wager is on India’s new generation of hybrid builders – designers who can code, engineers who can design, and PMs who can prototype. This blend of creativity and technical depth positions India to be the first market to fully embody Figma’s idea-to-production vision.

As global tech giants compete to get anchored to India’s fast-evolving, AI-powered developer economy, Figma’s differentiation may lie in its DNA: building not just for the community, but with it.

[Edited by Kumar Chatterjee]