Wall Street just repriced software-as-a-service. Again.
Security stocks sold off after Anthropic PBC launched Claude Code Security. Investors reacted the way they’ve reacted all year: assuming artificial intelligence collapses categories, compresses multiples, ask questions later. CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., Cloudflare Inc. and others took the hit as the market tries to digest what agentic AI actually means for incumbents.
Over the past few weeks we’ve been unpacking what some are calling the $285 billion “SaaSpocalypse” — the broad multiple compression across public SaaS. The conclusion so far: This isn’t random destruction. It’s a sorting event.
Over the past three weeks, TheCUBE Research partner Raphaëlle d’Ornano at Decoding Discontinuity has been helping us unpack the broader meaning of the SaaSpocalypse, providing a more nuanced and layered framework for navigating and understanding the turbulence. Part I of her series argued the $285 billion SaaSpocalypse was mispriced panic and should instead be about learning how to sort companies based on their agentic resilience. Part II decoded Anthropic’s $380 billion valuation through the lens of orchestration economics and explored the challenges large language models face as they move up the stack to become platform companies and dethrone SaaS players in some of these verticals.
Today, she dropped the final installment of her SaaS Reckoning series with a surprising look at one of the companies that been hit hardest in recent months: Figma Inc.
My take: The market just isn’t using the right filter.
The latest and most interesting case study: Figma.
It’s down roughly 70% from its peak, from a $70 billion IPO moment to roughly $12 billion in market cap. On the surface, that looks like a broken growth story — a classic SaaS 2.0 company repriced for AI disruption.
But that framing misses what’s actually happening.
This is about orchestration, not seats
The SaaS 2.0 playbook was simple: Build the best tool in a vertical, drive seat expansion, defend retention, layer features, grow annual revenue run rate. Valuations followed net revenue retention and market expansion.
That model is under pressure.
In an agentic world, defensibility shifts from features to flow control. From owning a category to owning a node in the orchestration graph.
And that’s where Figma’s recent moves get interesting.
On Feb. 17, Figma and Anthropic launched “Code to Canvas.” Developers working in Claude Code can push rendered user interfaces directly into Figma’s design canvas as fully editable objects. Not screenshots. Not flat exports. Actual structured design layers.
Type “Send this to Figma” in the terminal — and the bridge opens.
This matters for one reason: It closes the loop.
Figma had already been pushing design context outward through its Dev Mode MCP Server — components, tokens, variables flowing to AI coding agents. Code to Canvas makes that connection bidirectional.
Context flows both ways.
And it runs on MCP — the emerging open protocol becoming the USB-C of AI orchestration — now integrated across Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor and VS Code.
This isn’t feature velocity. It’s architectural positioning.
Routing density is the new moat
In the orchestration era, software defensibility is no longer about UI polish or workflow checklists. It’s about semantic density.
A task manager is semantically thin. A design system is semantically dense.
Agents can easily recreate thin layers. They lose fidelity when bypassing dense ones.
Figma isn’t just a design tool anymore. It’s a shared design system across engineering, product, marketing and increasingly nondesigners. Nearly 60% of Figma Make files are now created by nondesigners. More than 75% of customers use multiple Figma products.
That’s routing density.
When agents generate UI, they need system context — tokens, constraints, component libraries, brand systems. If that context lives in Figma, agents must call through it. They can’t simply route around it without degradation.
That’s the shift the market isn’t pricing correctly.
The numbers support the architectural story
Figma Make usage jumped 70% quarter over quarter. Enterprise customers are building weekly. GitHub highlighted managing more than 7,400 design tokens through Figma’s MCP integration on an earnings call.
When the largest code hosting platform in the world publicly validates your orchestration layer, that’s not noise. That’s signal.
Does MCP’s openness create risk? Of course. If every design tool stands up an MCP server, the protocol itself doesn’t create exclusivity.
But nodes compound value through density, workflow breadth and accumulated context. You can replicate an endpoint. You can’t instantly replicate years of cross-functional design system gravity.
That’s the difference between a convenience layer and a throughput node.
The market is sorting by sector. It should be sorting by position
Right now, public markets are applying blanket discounts: horizontal vs. vertical, security vs. productivity, DevOps vs. design. Everything SaaS is treated as vulnerable to LLM displacement.
That’s lazy sorting.
The real filter is this:
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Does the company control semantically dense workflow context?
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Do agents lose fidelity when bypassing it?
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Is it building bidirectional bridges into the agent ecosystem?
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Does usage compound as agent activity increases?
If the answer is yes, that company may not be disrupted by AI. It may be reinforced by it.
Figma at $40 billion was arguably priced for inevitability. Figma at $12 billion may be priced for obsolescence.
The more accurate framing is neither. It’s architectural transition.
The SaaSpocalypse is a filter
The repricing we’re seeing isn’t the death of SaaS. It’s a capital markets reset around a new technical reality.
Seat-based expansion metrics matter less. Routing dependency matters more. Feature differentiation compresses. Workflow centrality compounds.
The winners in the next cycle won’t be the companies with the most features. They’ll be the ones agents cannot route around. That’s the lens.
The SaaSpocalypse isn’t chaos. It’s a filter. And the filter is architectural.
Everything else is noise.
Image: Figma
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