Parks has been made head of the newly-public web design company's venture unit as it tries to capitalise on improvements in AI technology.
McKenzie Parks has joined the US app and website design software company Figma to head its corporate investment unit, Figma Ventures.
Figma Ventures was established in 2022 and sits in the corporate development and strategy team at Figma. Until now, it has not had dedicated full-time staff at the unit, suggesting Parks’s hiring is part of a planned uptick in activity. In March, the unit participated in the $52m series B funding round for Graphite, which makes AI coding assistants.
Figma listed on the New York Stock Exchange at the end of July, prompting hopes that it would inspire more software company IPOs which had long been delayed due to market uncertainty. In a sign of rising sentiment for the sector, Figma’s Australian rival Canva, a private company, has since jumped up in value when it launched an employee stock sale that saw it valued at $42bn, up from $32bn after a secondary market sale last October.
Companies specialising in web design software are under pressure to show investors they can withstand or benefit from improvements in generative AI technology. Figma Ventures’s investment in Graphite fits a wider trend of enterprise sofware companies like Salesforce and Microsoft investing heavily in gen-AI startups. In November, the unit also backed Wordware, which is making an AI development tool that can be directed by written prompts rather than code.
Parks comes to the role with both a venture capital and startup background. Before joining Figma, she was director of business operations and strategy at the SaaS application security company AppOmni, which she joined in 2023.
Parks had come to know AppOmni while working with Costanoa Ventures, an early-stage VC fund. AppOmni was one of Costanoa’s portfolio companies and Parks had been a board observer at the startup since 2021.
