Design platform Canva, used by about 265 million people worldwide, said it will shift to an artificial intelligence (AI)-first corporations. The strategy is to evolve beyond simply offering features that make it easy to create visual content and become a platform that supports the entire creative workflow from design conception to final output.
Melanie Perkins, Canva co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), unveiled the AI-based design model "Canva AI 2.0" at an online press briefing on the 10th, calling it "an integrated design AI platform that dramatically boosts productivity in visual content creation."
Powered by a design-dedicated AI model developed by Canva's AI Lab, "Canva AI 2.0" lets users complete everything from ideation and research to the full design process in one place. Like popular AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, it has a conversational structure. If you type or say requests in the chat window such as "Create a lively social media (SNS) post promoting the latest podcast episode" or "Make the product stand out more," the AI refers to the user's past work history and proceeds to create and edit the content.
Perkins said, "Since its founding in 2013, Canva has spent the last 10 years integrating complex and fragmented design work into a single platform to make it easy and simple." Previously, you had to use different tools for each task, such as tools for generating templates needed for graphic design, tools for creating fonts, and tools for finding stock images, but Canva brought them together in one place to eliminate hassle and shorten the time spent on design.
She explained, "This time, we built an AI platform to solve the problem of the entire creative process being scattered across numerous tools, tabs, and workflows." For example, when creating a campaign to promote running shoes, you have to slightly adapt the same design for different uses, such as ad images, Instagram and other SNS posts, Instagram Stories, and YouTube video thumbnails. Perkins said, "If you ask 'Canva AI 2.0' to plan a multi-channel campaign for running shoes, it can generate campaigns for all purposes at once, and you can delegate editing of design elements like fonts, colors, and placement to AI agents."
"Canva AI 2.0" comes with memory, learning from the user's existing designs to generate more personalized, tailored content, and can leverage conversations exchanged in workplace messengers like email or Slack to understand the purpose and use of content in advance. It can create a tailored presentation (PPT) in under one minute based on meeting information posted on the Zoom video conferencing platform or Google Calendar, and it can automatically generate weekly team announcements by referencing the latest information posted in Slack.
Perkins explained, "By bringing together work and context scattered across multiple apps and platforms in one place, we can reduce the time and effort needed to create the visual content you need."
Powerful search features were also added. Cameron Adams, Canva chief product officer (CPO), said, "If you search 'Canva AI 2.0' for information needed to draft a proposal for a supplement brand, it will pull relevant information from the web and organize it into documents or tables."
Chief operating officer (COO) Cliff Obrecht cited speed and price competitiveness as differentiators for "Canva AI 2.0." He said, "Canva's in-house AI model can run at 5 to 20 times lower expense than frontier models and is much faster," adding, "It's a specialized model built on the vast design data we've accumulated over the past 14 years."
Based in Sydney, Australia, Canva ranked third last month in global Generative AI app monthly visitors tallied by U.S. venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), following ChatGPT and Gemini. a16z said Canva is "a representative case of successfully transitioning from a software corporations to an AI corporations." While there are concerns that major design software corporations like Adobe and Figma will be hit by the rise of AI-based image generation tools, including Google "Nanobanana," Canva appears to be holding its ground.
In fact, by rapidly integrating AI across its platform, Canva's annual recurring revenue last year grew nearly 50% to $4 billion (about 5.94 trillion won). Monthly active users number 265 million, including 31 million paying subscribers. As corporate customers increase, related revenue has surpassed $500 million.
The company is accelerating its shift to an AI corporations through AI investment, research and development (R&D) support, and acquisitions of promising corporations. Canva's AI Lab employs more than 100 dedicated AI researchers, and in 2024 it acquired the AI startup LeonardoAI and began developing its own AI model. Earlier this month, it bought the AI collaboration and agent management startup SimTeori and the marketing automation startup Orto, and two weeks ago it acquired the digital out-of-home advertising startup Dooli. Last month, it bought the animation startup Kabbali and the advertising performance improvement corporations MangoAI.
Obrecht said, "AI seems to be everywhere, but in reality about two-thirds of the world's population still doesn't use AI at all, so the growth potential is huge," adding, "By aggressively adopting AI, we will become the No. 1 corporations in visual content creation."
"Canva AI 2.0" will be offered first to the first 100 people on a research preview basis starting on the 16th (local time), after which the rollout will gradually expand.