Canva

Canva is an Australian software company that sells a browser-based visual design platform on a freemium basis. Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams founded it in Perth on 1 January 2013, after Perkins and Obrecht had spent several years running Fusion Books, an online tool schools used to lay out yearbooks. The product was built for people with no formal design training: a drag-and-drop editor over a large template library, free to start and charged for by subscription once teams want brand controls, storage and collaboration.

The platform now spans presentations, social posts, print, video, websites, whiteboards, spreadsheets (Canva Sheets) and a generative coding assistant (Canva Code), most of which arrived with the Visual Suite 2 release in April 2025. Canva also owns Affinity, the professional vector, pixel and page-layout suite it acquired with Serif in 2024; in October 2025 it relaunched Affinity as a single application and made the base product free.

Artificial intelligence now sits at the centre of the roadmap. Canva shipped the Magic Write copywriting assistant in December 2022, released its own design model in October 2025 that generates layouts as separately editable layers and objects, and put Canva AI 2.0 into research preview in April 2026 — an assistant that calls the platform's own tools, connects to Slack, Gmail, Google Drive and Zoom, and can schedule recurring design work. Cliff Obrecht has described the company as "becoming an AI platform with a bunch of design tools" rather than the reverse.

By the end of 2025 Canva reported more than 265 million monthly active users, up about 20% year on year, more than 31 million paid users and annual recurring revenue of $4 billion, of which $500 million came from business customers with more than 25 seats. Sacra records that ARR figure as a 43% rise on $2.8 billion in 2024, and puts total capital raised at roughly $572.6 million — very little for a company of this size, reflecting that Canva has been profitable since 2017.

The cost of AI has since caught up with it. On 3 August 2026 Canva cut its expected annual revenue growth from 30% to 20%, saying serving its AI features was more expensive than planned; second-quarter revenue of $921.9 million, up 25.2%, missed internal guidance. Melanie Perkins said cost per AI task had fallen almost 90% since Canva AI 2.0 launched, but that users were creating three times as many designs. On 14 August 2026 the Australian venture firms Blackbird and Airtree cut their carrying value of Canva by 17%, from $42 billion to $34.9 billion, and the independent valuation used to price Canva's own employee share issuance fell from $38.9 billion to $31 billion.