Figma

Dandy

Figma

Figma uses a freemium model. Individual designers can use Figma for free with up to three active projects.

Teams pay per editor per month — $15/month for the Professional tier and $75/month for the Organization tier. Viewers are always free, which was revolutionary.

In Sketch, if a developer wanted to inspect a design, they needed a license. In Figma, you just send them a link.

This "free viewers, paid editors" model was genius because it turned every designer into a distribution channel. A designer joins a company, uses Figma, invites 50 engineers and PMs to view files, and suddenly the whole company is embedded in the Figma ecosystem.

When decision-makers see everyone already using it, upgrading to a paid team plan is automatic.

Revenue grew from essentially nothing in 2018 to over $600 million ARR by 2023. The company was profitable by mid-2022 — unusual for a venture-backed startup.

They achieved this without a massive enterprise sales team. The product spread bottom-up through organizations, designer by designer, team by team.

Dandy

Vertical SaaS plus manufacturing. Dandy provides dental practices with intraoral scanners (often subsidized or free to eliminate the switching cost), cloud-based software for managing cases, and its own network of digital dental labs that manufacture the final restorations.

Dentists pay per case — each crown, bridge, veneer, or implant restoration is priced individually. The margin comes from manufacturing efficiency: digital workflows are faster, more precise, and require less manual labor than traditional hand-sculpted methods.

As volume grows, Dandy's labs get more efficient and per-unit costs drop. It's the classic razor-and-blades model — give away the scanner, make money on every restoration.

Figma

Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University in 2012 after interning at Flipboard and winning a Thiel Fellowship — Peter Thiel's program that pays students $100,000 to leave college and start something. His co-founder Evan Wallace was a Brown classmate and graphics programming wizard who'd built impressive WebGL demos that proved browsers could handle complex visual work.

Their original idea wasn't even a design tool. Field initially wanted to build a flight search engine, then pivoted to drone photography, before landing on the insight that would define Figma: professional creative tools were stuck in the desktop era while everything else had moved to the cloud.

Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch — all required downloads, all worked on local files, and none of them let two people work on the same file simultaneously.

The technical challenge was enormous. Nobody believed you could build a high-performance vector graphics editor that ran entirely in a web browser.

Field and Wallace spent three years — 2012 to 2015 — just building the rendering engine before they had a product anyone could use. They basically had to invent new technology for browser-based graphics processing.

The first public beta launched in December 2015, and designers immediately noticed something no other tool offered: real-time multiplayer editing, like Google Docs but for design.

Dandy

Henry Stott was a repeat entrepreneur who had previously co-founded a tech company in the UK. When he looked at the dental industry, he saw a $15 billion lab market that was shockingly analog.

Here's how it worked: a dentist jams a tray of gooey putty into your mouth, waits for it to harden, mails the physical mold to a dental lab, where a technician hand-sculpts your crown out of ceramic. Turnaround: 2 to 3 weeks.

Error rate: high. Patient experience: miserable.

The technology to do this digitally had existed for years — 3D intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM software, CNC milling machines — but nobody had stitched it into a seamless end-to-end platform for the average dental practice. Stott started Dandy in 2020 to be that platform.

Provide the scanner, build the software, run the lab — and make it so easy that any dentist can switch from analog to digital without changing how they practice.

Figma

Figma grew almost entirely through product-led growth — the product was so good and so easy to share that it spread virally through design teams. Every shared Figma link was marketing.

Every viewer who saw a design file in their browser without downloading anything was a conversion event.

The "free viewers" decision was the single most important growth lever. Traditional design tools charged per seat.

Figma said: only editors pay, everyone else is free. This removed all friction from collaboration and meant that for every paying designer, there might be 10-20 free viewers — all of whom experienced the product and became advocates.

Community was the second engine. Figma's open plugin system and free template marketplace created an ecosystem that locked in users.

Designers built their workflows around Figma-specific plugins, teams built design systems in Figma components, and switching costs climbed. By 2022, Figma had become the default — not just a design tool, but the operating system for product design.

Dandy

Land-and-expand with dental practices. Dandy gives practices the scanner for free or at heavy discount, which eliminates the biggest barrier to switching from analog.

Once a practice starts submitting digital scans, they become recurring revenue — every patient who needs a crown is a Dandy order. Sales team targets mid-size practices (3 to 10 dentists) that are high-volume but haven't invested in digital yet.

Referral programs where existing dentists recommend Dandy to colleagues. Geographic density strategy — build lab capacity in a region, then saturate practices nearby to optimize logistics and turnaround times.

Content marketing educating dentists on why digital is better, faster, and more profitable than analog workflows.

Figma

The Adobe acquisition saga was the biggest test. In September 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for $20 billion — the largest private software acquisition ever proposed.

Designers panicked. Would Adobe kill Figma's culture?

Bloat it with features? Integrate it into Creative Cloud and ruin the simplicity?

The deal fell apart in December 2023 when European regulators signaled they'd block it on antitrust grounds. Adobe walked away and paid a $1 billion breakup fee.

Figma was independent again — but now had to prove it could grow into a $20 billion company on its own.

Competition is intensifying. Canva is pushing into professional design.

Adobe is rebuilding its own collaborative tools. And newer entrants are using AI to generate designs automatically, potentially reducing the need for traditional design tools altogether.

Figma's challenge is staying ahead in a market it created while expanding into adjacent categories like presentations, whiteboarding, and development handoff.

Dandy

Dental practices are notoriously resistant to change — many dentists have used the same lab for 20 years and switching feels risky. The scanner hardware is expensive to subsidize at scale, creating a capital-intensive land grab.

Quality control across distributed manufacturing is hard — a crown that doesn't fit means a remake, an unhappy patient, and a dentist who might switch back to their old lab. Competition from established digital players like Align Technology and legacy lab companies investing in their own digital capabilities.

The dental industry is fragmented — 200,000+ practices in the US, mostly small businesses, which means enterprise-style sales don't work. Each practice is its own decision maker with its own habits.

Figma

Figma Design — the core browser-based interface design tool with real-time multiplayer collaboration, component libraries, auto-layout, and prototyping. FigJam — a collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, diagramming, and planning that competes with Miro and Mural.

Dev Mode — a workspace specifically for developers to inspect designs, extract code snippets, and understand spacing and styling without bothering designers. Figma Slides — presentation software launched in 2024 that lets teams build slide decks using the same design tools and component libraries.

Community — a marketplace of free and paid design templates, plugins, and UI kits created by designers worldwide.

Dandy

Dandy Scanner — provided to dental practices, captures a full 3D digital impression of the patient's mouth in minutes. No more putty molds.

Cloud-based case management platform where dentists submit scans, approve designs, and track orders. AI-powered restoration design that generates crown and veneer designs automatically from 3D scans, reducing turnaround from weeks to days.

Digital dental lab network with automated CNC milling and 3D printing for manufacturing restorations. Shade matching technology using AI to color-match restorations to surrounding teeth.

Integration with practice management software so cases flow seamlessly from scan to delivery.

Figma

Index Ventures led the Series A and has been involved in nearly every round. Greylock Partners was an early backer.

Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital invested in growth rounds. Addition (Lee Fixel's fund) led the Series E that valued Figma at $10 billion.

The final private round in 2024, after the Adobe deal collapsed, reportedly valued Figma at $12.5 billion. Peter Thiel was indirectly connected through the Thiel Fellowship that funded Dylan Field's early journey.

Dandy

Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, IVP, DST Global, and IA Ventures. Series C in 2023 valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.