Three years ago, Figma, a technology start-up that provides a design platform, was on the cusp of a major payday.

The San Francisco-based company had struck a deal to sell itself to the software giant Adobe for a whopping $20 billion. But the sale unraveled under the scrutiny of European Union, British and American regulators, vaporizing Figma’s potential windfall and leaving the company to pick up the pieces.

On Thursday, Figma bounced back — and then some. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange, with its shares opening at $85, more than two and a half times its initial public offering price of $33. That put Figma’s market capitalization at $49.8 billion, more than double the $20 billion that Adobe had offered it.

Figma’s stock “pop” — Wall Street lingo for how much a stock jumps on its first day of trading — was an eye-watering 158 percent, far above the midteens percentage rise that companies and their underwriters typically aim for.

“The moments of the past kind of flash through your brain, how you got here, but also just excitement about the future is so palpable,” Dylan Field, a Figma co-founder and the company’s chief executive, said in an interview after ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. “We have so much ahead to build.”

The I.P.O. instantly turned Mr. Field, 33, into the latest tech billionaire, with his stake in Figma worth more than $4.6 billion.

Figma’s stock market debut was one of the biggest public offerings so far this year, as the I.P.O. market picks up after a yearslong lull. After President Trump’s inauguration, bankers and start-ups had hoped for a surge in public offerings, only to be hit by turbulence driven by trade wars. Companies including the payments giant Klarna and the digital bank Chime postponed their offerings.

Since then, stock markets have stabilized somewhat. CoreWeave, a company that runs data centers that help power giant artificial intelligence systems, went public in March. Chime, too, eventually went public. Klarna and other companies, including the online ticket resale marketplace StubHub, are waiting their turn.

“Figma will be a bellwether for the tech sector,” Nick Einhorn, the director of research at Renaissance Capital, which follows I.P.O.s., said before Figma went public. “If it performs well, then I think a lot of companies will take encouragement from that.”

Figma was founded in 2012 by Mr. Field and Evan Wallace, who met while studying computer science at Brown University. The company makes online software that allows designers, developers and others to build websites and apps. People can use Figma’s platform to collaborate on a project in real time, similar to the way everyone can leave comments on a Google Doc.

Will Griffith, a partner at the venture capital firm Iconiq Capital, said he met Mr. Field when the entrepreneur was a 19-year-old dropout from Brown and was working with Mr. Wallace and a dog out of a small apartment in Palo Alto, Calif.

Mr. Field had a “fervent passion” for reimagining software that was typically expensive and required powerful computers to run, said Mr. Griffith, who invested in Figma at 9 cents a share in 2013.

Figma’s products can be used for free, but those who want more features pay for subscriptions, with some plans costing up to $90 a month. Netflix, Duolingo and Uber are among the companies using Figma’s products for their websites and mobile applications.

Along the way, Figma raised about $333 million in funding, according to its prospectus. Its biggest investors include the venture capital firms Index Ventures, Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins.

In 2021, Mr. Wallace, who was Figma’s chief technology officer, left the company. He is its second-largest shareholder after Mr. Field, with about a 5 percent stake that he owns through a trust. Mr. Field holds a 9 percent stake, though because he owns a special class of shares and has voting control over Mr. Wallace’s stock, he controls about 74 percent of the vote at the company.

In September 2022, Figma announced its sale to Adobe, the maker of Photoshop and other design software. It was a crowning moment for the start-up, but the deal drew scrutiny from antitrust regulators over whether a combined entity would crowd out competitors.

For more than a year, Mr. Field and Adobe executives sought to allay regulators’ concerns. But in December 2023, the companies announced that the deal was off. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion breakup fee.

“Ultimately there is some gap between how regulators understand our business and how we understand our business,” Mr. Field said at the time.

Danny Rimer, a venture capitalist at Index Ventures who sits on Figma’s board, said in an interview that there was “frustration” over how regulators “had such authority on an outcome with minimal fluency in what they were deciding upon.”

“To this day,” he continued, “Adobe does not compete with Figma.”

In the aftermath, Figma reset itself. It set its internal valuation at $10 billion, half of what Adobe had offered. That hurt so-called Figmates — the nickname for its employees — who had hoped to cash in on the sale to Adobe but were left holding less valuable stock. Figma later let employees sell their holdings to investors at a $12.5 billion valuation.

The company has since focused on new products, particularly those powered by artificial intelligence. This spring, it announced four new offerings to expand its design software. More than two-thirds of its users now are nondesigners, the company said.

“It would have been so easy to go, ‘OK, good time to pause and rest our feet a little bit,’” Mr. Field said in the interview. “Instead we just kept running.”

Figma is also profitable. The company posted a $44.9 million profit for the first quarter, more than triple the amount a year earlier, according to its prospectus. Revenue was $228 million, up 46 percent from a year earlier.

In April, Figma filed to go public, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Allen & Company and JPMorgan Chase managing the I.P.O. On Thursday, the company completed its comeback from the failed sale when its shares began publicly trading.

Figma’s I.P.O. could help the company take even grander steps, such as transformative takeovers, Mr. Field said in the interview. The company also plans to focus more on developing A.I. tools, he said, calling it “our biggest opportunity.”

“Investors know that we plan to take big swings,” he said.