Figma Brings Bud Team In-House, Says Startup Will Shut Down By Mid-July

Figma is expanding its product engineering bench with the hire of the team behind Bud, the Y Combinator-backed startup formerly known as Orchids, and the companies say Bud’s services will be taken offline by July 18. Users of both Bud and Orchids have been told to export or move their projects before that deadline.

The move pushes Figma deeper into code generation and interactive prototyping, folding a small group that moved from quick-build app tooling into autonomous agent work into its ranks. Bud’s founder, Kevin Lu, posted on X that the team believes the acquisition will let their work continue inside a larger design and development ecosystem.

Bud started as a streamlined tool for turning design ideas into working apps across phones, sites, chat platforms and browser extensions, then shifted toward an agent platform that could call external services, fetch information from the web and write scripts to carry out routines. Under the agreement, the startup will discontinue customer-facing products and integrate the personnel and technology into Figma’s roadmap.

The shutdown comes after a report earlier this year, citing an independent security researcher, that flagged vulnerabilities in apps built on Orchids. That episode has prompted questions from some users about whether the integration will include extra security reviews and safeguards. A cybersecurity consultant who reviewed the public filings said companies that fold smaller teams into larger products typically run a series of audits and code reviews before production deployment.

Figma has not provided a detailed plan for how it will redeploy the team, but recent product moves suggest the company wants to blur the line between mockups and runnable applications. Last year it rolled out tooling aimed at producing web apps, and this year it added support for external code-generation models and launched its own AI assistants, signaling a shift toward letting teams build and prototype functional software inside the Figma workspace.