Figma was founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace as a browser-based collaborative design platform.
Field and Wallace created Figma to make professional interface design work directly in a web browser. This approach allowed designers and other teammates to work on the same files without relying on traditional desktop-only workflows.
Figma became especially influential in product design because it combined vector editing, prototyping, commenting and real-time collaboration. Those features helped teams review designs while engineers, product managers and researchers were involved in the same project.
Canva is another major browser-based design company, but it serves a broader audience and was founded in Australia. Sketch, by contrast, became known primarily as a Mac design application. Figma’s defining early distinction was collaborative browser-based editing.