Artificial intelligence has made it easy for almost anyone to build the first version of an app. Getting the last part right is still hard. Meghna Kumar, sales director at Figma, who oversees the Asia-Pacific region, says that problem matters more in India than almost anywhere else, because companies here grow fast and build for very different kinds of users.
It is one of the reasons Figma has brought Config, its annual conference for people who build products, to India for the first time. The event usually takes place in San Francisco. This year it has come to Bengaluru, along with co-founder and CEO Dylan Field.
Why India matters
India is Figma’s second-largest active user market in the world. Figma says it works with more than 40 per cent of the top BSE 100 companies, and its customers include Airtel, Cars24, Myntra, Swiggy and Zomato.
Figma opened an office in Bengaluru last year. “We were always working with our customers and user base in India, but last year we decided it’s time to have a team in India so we can stay closer to them and work with them as workflows change,” Meghna told t2oS.
Pricing in India follows Figma’s global plans. Organisations use the Organization or Enterprise plans, and Meghna said Governance+ is especially popular in India “because of data residency and a lot of industries being regulated”. Figma is free for students in India.
Figma is no longer seen as a tool only for designers. “One-third of our global users are designers. One-third of our global users are developers, and one-third of our global users are non-developers, non-designers,” she said. Figma’s own figures show that about two-thirds of its monthly active users describe themselves as something other than a designer.
Generative AI has given that wider group plenty of other ways to get work done, which raises the question of why they would stay with Figma. Meghna pointed to what she sees at the Indian companies she works with, where firms are experimenting with AI both in how they work and in the products they ship.
“Getting to that first draft, or building something at the initial stages, is very easy. Almost anyone can build because of AI,” she said. “The end part of refining, of reiterating, of making sure it’s in your brand guidelines, that gets tougher.” She also sees people working in isolation, “headphones on, sitting in a silo”, and job roles merging. “We are seeing more and more non-designers come into design work, and we are seeing designers do non-design work, which means the swim lanes are blurring.”
That makes collaboration more important than before. “People are saying, ‘Hey, now collaboration is needed even more than before. I really need to sit with my PM (product manager) and my designer and developer.’ CEOs are now looking at Figma files and making decisions.”
For engineers, the decision comes down to results. “What is your objective as a developer, as a front-end engineer? It’s to ship product fast with the least possible bugs, and then they will adopt the tool that makes the most sense for them.”
She described where the product is going in simple terms. “An idea, or a design, or a starting point can come from anywhere. It can come from design. It can come from code.”
The products announced at Config India follow that idea. Code layers, launching in open beta, let teams build, edit and compare code-backed prototypes directly on the Figma Design canvas and take them all the way to production. A code layer can be created by prompting the Figma agent, by pulling from a GitHub repository or from a coding agent through MCP (Model Context Protocol). Figma Specs is a markdown editor built into Figma that lets teams document their intent for colleagues and agents, and it can embed FigJam diagrams, code layers and designs. A new central home for design systems brings design libraries, code libraries and guidelines together in one place. Payload, the open-source backend and content management system that Figma acquired last year, now connects to Figma Make, so teams can ship websites and internal tools that run on real data. Payload’s downloads have grown sixfold in the past 12 months.
Not just digital natives
Meghna said the range of companies using Figma surprised her. “I thought only digital natives use Figma. I was blown away.” She listed electric two-wheeler maker Ather Energy, banks, fintech companies, manufacturers and the public sector. UX4G, the government’s design system used for DigiLocker, is built on Figma. “They are building for 1.2 billion Indians. That is crazy.”
She said Indian companies have a recognisable approach built on speed, scale and fast expansion. That adds a lot of complexity, because products have to work across languages and demographics. “What they want to build for my Punjabi mom sitting in Punjab will be very different to my friends who use it in Bengaluru.”
Razorpay is one of her favourite examples because it is a business-to-business payments layer that most people never see, yet it still takes design seriously. “How do you design a product where it’s almost the invisible layer?”
Meghna’s region covers very different markets. Singapore is small but “wants to be known for innovation” and invests early in research. Much of the rest of Southeast Asia is still emerging, and she said many companies from there have come to Config India to learn from Indian firms. Figma’s customers in the region include Grab and DBS.
South Korea, she said, “is a totally different, complex market”, led by conglomerates and highly mature in product and design. Figma works with Woowa Brothers, which runs the food-delivery app Baemin, and with Hyundai. “They are a homogeneous market. India is a heterogeneous market.” In Korea, the priority is “the quality of UI… clean interfaces”, while India needs to handle scale and multiple brands.
Students are a big part of Figma’s plans in India. Figma is launching its Campus Leaders Program here, the first outside North America. Through it, Figma will work with student leaders to run community events and grow adoption. Meghna also pointed to the design undergraduate programmes now offered at the IITs and other leading institutions, and said Figma wants to work closely with them.
New AI models arrive every few months, so keeping up is hard for any software company. “All I see is how laser-focused our C-suite and the company is on product and the community,” she said. “The way they listen to customer feedback is very impressive.”
She kept returning to something she believes in: “We’re just getting started in India.”