After Its $20 Billion Windfall Evaporated, a Start-Up Picks Up the Pieces
Summary
In Washington, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department have raised questions about many deals in recent years, suing to block some and toughening guidelines for merger reviews. In December, Illumina, a gene-sequencing machine company, agreed to sell Grail, a developer of cancer tests that it bought in 2021 for $7.1 billion, after battling U.S. and European regulators. A week before the merger was announced that September, Adobe canceled work on “Project Spice,” a new product that regulators said would have put it in direct competition with Figma. Stock was a large part of their compensation, but the new employees who left before the deal closed would forfeit their shares, including those they had vested, or earned, after working at the company for a year, according to internal communications viewed by The New York Times. For a remedy, the regulator proposed in November that Adobe divest a crown jewel of its business, such as Photoshop or Illustrator — or that Figma spin off its main design offering.