The 10-year-old Australian startup, led by Melanie Perkins, said it hit $1.6 billion in annual revenue and also announced brand-focused features for its 6 million team accounts.
Shortly after CEO Melanie Perkins launched Canva, investors told her she was missing out on a fully-capable market from the design software startup’s pitch deck. She refused to give it.
“I thought eventually everyone was going to create some form of visual content and use Canva,” said Perkins. forbes“And the question is, ‘How big can we go?’ And I think that’s still my answer.”
Ten years from now, not everyone in the world is using Canva, but you can expect a burgeoning chunk. Over 125 million people use his Canva design software tools every month, and in the last 6 months he has grown by 35 million. At that time, Canva began a product overhaul, evolving from a software tool for graphic designers into a suite of tools suitable for a wider working team, including collaborative documents, virtual whiteboards and website creation. Now, the company has unveiled a range of additional products for business brands, as well as the topic of the day: artificial intelligence.
At Thursday’s event in Sydney, where Canva will be live-streaming to 1 million remote viewers, it unveiled a range of AI capabilities under the name ‘Magic’. This includes Magic Design, which allows you to create personalized design templates from images and styles. Magic Presentation, which allows you to create slideshow-style presentations from prompts, and Magic Write, a copywriting tool. Canva users can use his AI software to locate locations in images and add or remove elements or translate them into additional languages with just a few clicks.
Founded in 2012 by Perkins, her husband Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adams, Canva has grown from an overlooked Australian startup to a global phenomenon. forbes After raising funds in December 2019 at a hefty valuation of $40 billion in September 2021 (Perkins and Obrecht have pledged to donate a “majority” of their personal fortune to Canva’s foundation. ), which was later slashed by some investors to a valuation of about $25 billion. In the recession of the high-tech market. Since the peak valuation was announced, the company has more than doubled his monthly user count. After taking him five years to reach 10 million users, he added the same total in the last 30 days. Annual revenue is now up from $1 billion to $1.6 billion by the end of 2021.
On the brand side, Canva’s new tools will make it easier for businesses to set their preferred colors, fonts and other controls. You can also easily update the logo across your team’s different designs with just one click. It can also alert creatives when their work doesn’t properly match templates and brand guidelines. Along with improvements to other requested features, such as the ability to add gradients, layers and images to alt text, they will come as the company continues to push teams and companies. said to be the main driver of growth. His 6 million teams now use his Canva, including American Airlines, Marriott, Salesforce and Zoom.
Meanwhile, its AI announcement comes at a time when Canva was expected to respond to the recent boom in AI products fueled by the popularity of products like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. Other established startup “unicorns” such as his Coda and Notion, a collaboration software maker, have recently launched their own AI capabilities. Meanwhile, a wave of new startups like Tome, the hyped storytelling app, are making headlines early on with their own AI-infused tools.
According to Perkins, Canva has been working extensively on AI tools since 2019. At this time, he started working with Austrian startup Kaleido AI to remove backgrounds from videos and images via drag-and-drop. In the following year, he acquired Kaleido and announced the acquisition. early 2021To build the magic tool, Canva’s in-house AI team used the base models of OpenAI and Stable Diffusion, and also did their own training, Perkins said.
But by announcing Magic now, Canva is firmly in the zeitgeist. Giants like Microsoft and Adobe recently announced that they would be bringing AI tools from their Office suites into their core products (converting Word documents to PowerPoint presentations with just a click). image generation (Adobe’s new Firefly generation tool). “There’s always something that’s delivered in a trendy, fun way that people can play with, but people need to achieve a goal. They need to achieve a certain result,” Perkins said.
Asked what Canva’s growing number of automated and AI tools means for graphic designers and other creative professionals using the software, Perkins said such tools could help people perform routine tasks like exchanging logos. “I think brands will start asking different things from agencies and they will start asking different things from graphic designers,” she said. .
Perkins, who has spent more than a decade building Canva, argued that despite its size and the promise of a global user base, the company’s pace of innovation is growing faster, not slower. “We spent the first ten years of her building the platform, and now we’re super excited to spend the next ten years of her building magic,” she said. When it comes to competition, she said, “I think it’s really important to focus on our race and focus on pleasing our community. If we can do that, we’ll be fine.”