The owners of ADBE (ie. the shareholders) must be idiots to approve such a scam, IMO. I guess Figma is worth not even $1 billion, and the dealmakers secretly want to pocket the difference...
We use Figma and people fundamentally underestimate how fast it has penetrated the design world. It's by far the preferred tool of practically every designer that has graduated in the last 2 years, and every major tech company we know has either switched to Figma from Sketch/XD or is in the midst of switching. The real-time collaboration, CSS property inspection, and design library features are superior to those provided by any Adobe tool. We even use it for vector graphics, e.g. technical diagrams and illustrations, in lieu of Illustrator. The best way to describe its value is that it turns our design workflow into a rigorous engineering process. Mockup of a UI component: Hand-off of specs to frontend engineers: A part of our design library (typography): The revenue multiple may be a huge blip in the current funding environment, but this is a big win for Adobe. It's quite similar to Facebook's acquisition of Instagram years ago.
But is it worth $20 billion? That's the question. I guess for the teleworking arrangement that we are embracing more right now, this would be tremendously helpful but as many posters have said, this is just essentially a whiteboard after all. The value of something is the sum of all of the future income stream discounted today at an appropriate interest rate. So let's see how much future income this system will bring to Adobe and we will see whether it's worth $20 billion or not.
Of course, only time will tell. Keep in mind Figma isn't a whiteboarding platform. Figma's core feature is the ability to build a component libraries, compose anything quickly from those libraries, and have your team share them. In this sense it bears some similarities with Canva. The conflict resolution logic behind the real-time collaboration feature is also rather underrated, but anyone who has tried to implement a simple "multi-user" real-time document editor like Google Docs will know it's non-trivial. The fact that it works stably and fast in your browser with a large number of users concurrently editing the same mockup deserves credit. Here's a pretty cool write-up on it. Figma does have a whiteboarding feature called Figjam, which is a drop-in replacement for a whiteboarding app like Miro. If you consider that Canva and Miro were last valued at $20B and $17.5B respectively, the numbers are high, but not out of sync with the market.