Singapore - Article 5 - Figma+Thales

Why leading companies choose Singapore to anchor their design and innovation hub

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Figma: Designing for a diverse region from a global crossroads For Figma, setting up its Asia-Pacific hub in Singapore has been central to sustaining its rapid international growth. Although headquartered in San Francisco, 85% of Figma’s customers are outside the U.S., with a large concentration in Asia-Pacific—making Singapore’s proximity, connectivity, and multicultural talent base especially strategic.

Thales: Simultaneously safeguarding and transcending borders from Singapore Thales’s Singapore operations share a similar trajectory to Figma. Specializing in aerospace, defense, and digital identity and security, the French multinational company has designed everything from integrated warfare systems to biometric payment cards. It is also leading the way in developing quantum sensors that can attain accurate navigational positioning without satellite signals. The city-state was only the third country—after France and Canada—to host a Thales Digital Factory with a design center, a dedicated environment where multidisciplinary teams cocreate digital products in close collaboration with end users. This move reflects Singapore’s reputation as a trusted place to design, test, scale, and export next-generation technologies. “Being embedded deeply within the Thales Digital Factory, the Singapore design team is well-placed to drive user-centered innovation across a wide range of technologies and use cases,” says Lillian Ng-Thamrin, head of Thales Design Center in Singapore. “We believe design is a catalyst for breakthrough innovation.”

Figma and Thales are testament to Singapore’s dense nexus of talent, research institutes, higher learning establishments, design firms, and technology providers—which have created a powerful ecosystem for growth.

Singapore has long been recognized as an ideal home for regional headquarters, due to its location and ease of doing business. However, increasingly, multinational companies are not simply running operations out of Singapore—they are building the future. Among them are collaborative interface design company Figma and aerospace and defense corporation Thales, both of which have established deep innovation and design footprints in the country. “Singapore was a natural choice as a springboard to the region to meet our customers and community,” says Scott Pugh, vice president, Asia-Pacific, Figma. “Singapore is a global technology leader and offers an unmatched level of convenience, stability, and efficiency that makes it easier to do business and hire great talent.”

How Singapore becamea nation by design

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As Singapore’s national agency for design, we champion the use of design to grow business, spur innovation, and improve lives.

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As Singapore’s national agency for design, we champion the use of design to grow business, spur innovation, and improve lives.

Back to Home

Receive news on the latest design happenings.

Discover More Singapore Design

Find out how Singapore can power your design ambitions. Connect with us at info@designsingapore.org

WATCH NOW

How design is giving Singapore a global edge

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How design is driving innovation across Singapore—and beyond

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Now, as the challenges of a rapidly changing world become more complex, Singapore’s design ecosystem is embracing a systems-level approach, treating design as a socio-technical discipline that embeds trust, resilience, and sustainability into new solutions developed by those such as Thales. “Design’s role in Singapore has evolved from being primarily a pragmatic tool—in the early years of nation-building—to being embraced as a strategic capability and enabler for corporates,” says Ng-Thamrin. “Design in Singapore takes a multidisciplinary approach and is embedded across public services, urban development, and sustainability.” A testament to this capability is Thales’s ongoing work on a next-generation borderless immigration clearance system. For the past three years, its Singapore team has designed a solution that removes the need for lanes and gates altogether. The system allows travelers to walk at their natural paces, hands-free and uninterrupted, while an intelligent biometrics system verifies their identities and risk profiles in real time.

A defining strength of Singapore’s designers, developers, and tech professionals is their ability to navigate the region’s cultural and linguistic complexity. Southeast Asia alone encompasses more than 680 million people and a multitude of languages. Design teams operating in the city-state must understand, localize, and tailor experiences for markets that differ widely in culture, context, and digital maturity.

This cultural fluency enables Singapore-based teams to lead not only localization work but also global product innovation. Recently, Max Elias Melander, a Figma software engineer based in Singapore, helped build the glass effect feature—allowing designers to manipulate light, depth, frost, and more to create dynamic elements that refract light like physical glass. The feature’s build demonstrates how teams in the city-state can collaborate and shape global product launches.

These advancements didn’t go unnoticed. Paralux earned two 2025 Red Dot Awards—one for sustainability design and another for overall design—cementing the collection as a milestone in Samsonite’s portfolio. Bringing Paralux to life required an uncommon level of cross-continental collaboration, uniting designers from the U.S., Europe, and Singapore. With traveler expectations varying widely around the world, Singapore’s cultural diversity provided a crucial vantage point. It enabled the teams to develop a product that feels intuitive and relevant across multiple markets. The city-state’s multicultural population also provided real-world insights on how different people pack, sort, and move in today’s fast-paced urban centers. “Designing this collection here in Singapore has been a huge advantage: the local environment and diverse culture have contributed a lot to the design process,” says Yang. “We launched this product globally and have received amazing feedback so far. Singapore’s diversity reminds us that there’s no single ‘Asian consumer. That awareness makes our designs more inclusive and relevant.”

“Many companies are building for multiple markets at once,” says Pugh. “This means they need to design for many different cultures and language localization. Hiring talent with relevant Southeast Asian experience in Singapore is much easier than anywhere else in the world.”

Achieving this required the creation of a multi-sensor fusion model made possible by the multidisciplinary team in Singapore. Together, the sensors detect, identify, and track multiple individuals simultaneously, enabling faster throughput without compromising security.

A talent ecosystem built for solving tricky problems Much of Thales’s and Figma’s success in Singapore stems from the depth and breadth of the city-state’s talent ecosystem. Singapore has consistently topped global rankings as a destination for talent development and attraction, workforce readiness, and government-sponsored upskilling and retooling. Thales’s Singapore team alone spans specialized domains such as data analytics, cybersecurity, machine learning, human factors, and software development—all disciplines needed to tackle sophisticated challenges such as frictionless immigration. This expertise is strengthened by a collaborative culture. Teams are in constant dialogue with stakeholders across government, industry, and civil society—an approach that mirrors Singapore’s broader philosophy of integrating innovation, regulation, and user needs early in the design process. The common thread running through Thales’s and Figma’s Singapore operations is their ability to tackle complex, real-world problems with clarity and creativity. Their work illustrates how Singapore has evolved: no longer just a financial hub or operational base but now a proving ground for revolutionary ideas and products. As companies continue to seek places where talent, trust, and technological excellence intersect, Singapore stands out as a strategic launchpad—one where innovative concepts are not only imagined but are also built, tested, and scaled for global impact.

Now, as the challenges of a rapidly changing world become more complex, Singapore’s design ecosystem is embracing a systems-level approach, treating design as a socio-technical discipline that embeds trust, resilience, and sustainability into new solutions developed by those such as Thales. “Design’s role in Singapore has evolved from being primarily a pragmatic tool—in the early years of nation-building—to being embraced as a strategic capability and enabler for corporates,” says Lillian Ng-Thamrin, head of design center, Thales. “Design in Singapore takes a multidisciplinary approach and is embedded across public services, urban development, and sustainability.” A testament to this capability is Thales’s ongoing work on a next-generation borderless immigration clearance system. For the past three years, its Singapore team has designed a solution that removes the need for lanes and gates altogether. Known as iNescapable, the system allows travelers to walk at their natural paces, hands-free and uninterrupted, while an intelligent system verifies their identities and security statuses in real time.