Figma is quietly reshaping itself from a design tool into a full-blown development platform, and its latest move involves picking up the team behind an AI coding startup called bud. The startup, which was originally known as orchids and participated in y combinator, lets users create apps for mobile, web, slack, and more using natural language prompts.
Bud started as what many would call a vibe-coding platform, where describing an idea in plain english was enough to spin up a working app. It later evolved into a broader AI agent platform capable of browsing the web, interacting with services, and writing code to automate tasks. Under the acquisition deal, both bud and its predecessor orchids will shut down on july 18, and existing users will need to migrate their projects by then.
The financial terms were not disclosed, but bud’s ceo kevin lu posted on x that figma is “one of, if not the, defining product companies of our time” and a natural home for this new era of work.
Figma has not said exactly how it plans to use the bud team, but the broader strategy is coming into focus. The company has been steadily adding development-oriented features rather than staying in the design-only lane. Last year it launched figma make for creating web apps directly, and this year it integrated with openai’s codex and anthropic’s claude code, while also rolling out its own AI agents that can act on the canvas.
There was some controversy connected to the startup’s earlier incarnation. The BBC reported earlier this year that apps built on the orchids platform had security vulnerabilities that could be exploited. It is unclear whether those concerns factored into the decision to shut down bud and fold the team into figma.
The acquisition signals that figma sees AI-assisted development as a natural extension of its design canvas, bringing the gap between wireframes and working software even closer.
Source: TechCrunch
