Design platform Canva launched in 2013 with the aim of democratizing visual creation through features like templates and drag-and-drop graphics. It focused on ease, offering a design suite less daunting for nonprofessionals than tools like Adobe’s Photoshop, and simplified access with a web platform and freemium model. Since then, the Sydney-headquartered company has grown to 170 million monthly active users and an 11-figure valuation.
But with the advent of generative AI, it’s having to innovate to keep its place. Cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins insists she never saw AI as an existential threat and is excited to embrace it: This year, Canva acquired text-to-image generator Leonardo.ai and launched its Magic Studio suite of AI design tools. In October, it launched an AI assistant, Canva AI, which can help users refine their work—changing data into visuals, for instance—or offer design inspiration.
Previously focused on individuals and small businesses, the company is now going after larger corporate clients, acquiring business-focused design platform Affinity in March and courting CIOs with a rap battle that went viral for its extreme levels of cringe. Alongside lofty growth ambitions, Perkins and her cofounder (and husband) Cliff Obrecht have committed to putting most of their equity—totalling 30 percent—into giving back. Perkins told WIRED how they plan to reach both goals. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: What was your reaction when generative AI tools emerged, and suddenly designing visuals became as simple as typing a prompt?
MELANIE PERKINS: Canva’s vision has always been to enable you to take your idea and turn it into a design, and reduce the friction between those two points. I think because that has always been our ambition, we were very early to start to adopt AI in our product. The first really big piece for us was with Background Remover [Canva acquired AI background removal tool Kaleido in 2021], and we’ve continued to invest heavily in this space ever since. So when I first saw LLMs and generative AI, it was extraordinarily exciting, because I think it really helps us to achieve that initial mission.
There wasn’t a moment of concern that this might be an existential threat?
No, not at all.
Talk me through your AI game plan …
We have what we call our three-pronged approach. The first is taking the world’s latest and greatest technology and integrating it into our product and ensuring it’s a seamless user experience. Then in areas where we need to invest deeply, we’re investing really deeply, which was why we acquired Leonardo.ai recently, why we acquired Kaleido, and why we’re continuing to invest heavily at the forefront of AI. And the other is our app ecosystem, which means that companies can integrate into Canva’s platform and access our huge user base.
There’s a broader discussion about the impact of AI on human creativity. Do you have any concerns that AI could go too far—that it could take some of the fun out of design, or risk homogenizing it?
The tools designers have used over the years have changed and transformed with technology that’s available, and it feels very reminiscent of what’s happening now.
The world of visual communication has changed so radically. When we started out with Canva, 10 years ago, we were like, “The world’s going to become visual.” Over the last decade, that’s certainly proven to be more true. A decade ago, a marketer might create one billboard for a company or very minimal amounts of visual content, and now, pretty much every single touch point is an opportunity to express their brand and to be visual. It feels like the number of assets a company creates—even a student or a teacher, every profession and industry—has just grown exponentially. So I don’t think there’s going to be less room for creativity by any stretch of the imagination.
You’re currently leaning into the enterprise market. Where is Canva mainly being used within larger businesses?
It’s pretty extraordinary how widespread the use is across these organizations. We’ve done a deep dive with certain companies, and it’s surprisingly spread across everything from software teams creating technical diagrams to HR teams doing onboarding, to accounting teams doing presentations. I think we’ve particularly hit a sweet spot with marketing teams and sales teams. And then earlier this year, we launched Courses, which was a really exciting unlock for HR teams specifically.
In this new enterprise space, who do you see as your key competitors? Are you coming up against Microsoft Office and Google Workspace?
Right from the start, we had this Venn diagram: On one side is creativity, and on the other side is productivity. And you might guess, right in the center is Canva. We really believe that people on the productivity side actually want to be more creative, and that people on the creative side want to be more productive. And so we really found that to be the sweet spot—it was a huge gap in the market that we saw right in the early days, and it’s where we’re continuing to invest very heavily.
What about you? How does Canva use Canva?
Extremely extensively, for literally everything. Our engineers do their engineering docs in Canva, we do all-hands, I do all of my product mock-ups in it. I’ve used it for decision decks and vision decks and onboarding and hiring and recruitment—name something, we’re using Canva for it very extensively.
Your peak valuation was $40 billion in 2021. A year later, this was cut to $26 billion. What happened?
I think it was purely the macro shift in the market. During that time, Canva has continued to grow rapidly, both on revenue and active users. We’ve been profitable for seven years as well, so even though the market [switched to caring] more about profitability, we were fortunately already on that trend. Markets are going to value different things over time, and markets are going to be frothy and then not frothy. We are just always caring about building a strong, enduring company with good foundations that serves our community. So it’s not a particular bother what’s happening out there in the market.
You’ve pledged 30 pecent of Canva—the majority of your and Obrecht’s equity—to doing good in the world. What does that mean to you?
It seems completely absurd that we have the prosperity that we do across the globe, and there are people that still don’t have basic human needs being met. The first step that we’ve taken is partnering with GiveDirectly, where we give money directly to people who are living in extreme poverty. [Canva has so far donated a total of $30 million to people living in poverty in Malawi.] I love the empowerment that gives them to be able to spend the money on their community, on their family, on their basic human needs—sending their kids to school, getting a roof over their head. We have an extremely long way to go, but we’re really excited that we’ve started that process.
You aim to reach 1 billion users. What’s the plan to get there?
When we set that as a goal a number of years ago, it seemed completely ridiculous, but over the years, it’s becoming less ridiculous. We need about one in five internet users in every country to reach a billion. Now in the Philippines it’s one in six internet users, and in Australia it’s one in eight internet users. In Spain, it’s one in 11. In the USA, it’s one in 12. So at 200 million now, we’re a fifth of the way towards the billion number, and if we can continue to grow as rapidly as we have been, we’ll hopefully get there.
Any plans to IPO?
It’s definitely something on the horizon.
This article first appeared in the January/February 2025 edition of WIRED UK.
Source : Wired
