Canva has crafted a highly successful business model on the idea that graphic design should be accessible to everyone. The Australian company has raised $560 million since it was founded in 2012 and currently generates annual recurring revenue of about $1.7 billion, according to co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams.
Canva is in 190 countries and over 100 languages and has over 170 million signed up active users. But despite its rapid growth and international presence, the company has taken a few hits this year. A handful of Canva investors — including Blackbird, T. Rowe Price and Frank Templeton — downgraded the company’s valuation, which had peaked at $40 billion after a Raising $200 million in capital by 2021. Blackbird’s valuation of the company fell to $25.6 billion and T. Rowe Price’s to about $13 billion in June.
It would be easy to think that Canva had earned these understatements, but in reality, it was mostly about market sentiment. 2020 and 2021 saw a huge expansion in multiples that has since shrunk, causing investors to reassess. And regardless, by all standards, Canva is still decor.
Adams told TechCrunch+ that he’s not worried about the valuation dips, anyway. “This year has been one of our best years for growth. We have almost doubled in most of our metrics. We had 80 million more active users signed up than this time last year, so it was just up and to the right for us,” he said. “That’s what we’re focused on: more users, better products, more revenue.”
In the past 12 months, Canva has released a number of productive AI products that Adams said give both the company and its users a new ability to create features and design that they might not have even considered five years ago. “For us, AI is going to take human creativity to the next level,” Adams said, noting that AI will enable Canva to “bring great visual communication to a billion people around the world.”
Many companies have jumped on the AI bandwagon since ChatGPT broke ground in the consumer-facing space in November 2022, drawing the stares and suspicions of many journalists. But with Canva, genetic AI is different. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a better technology to power Canva’s user growth and monetization. Content is the bread and butter of the company, the main reason why Canva has managed to reach such impressive heights and beyond global borders. This is because the focus has always been on offering images and templates that suit specific geographic audiences.
“One of the keys to our growth is that we’ve always thought across borders internationally,” Adams said. Canva has over 120 million pieces of content in its library, which is widely sourced from individual partners and stock photo houses.
“We’ve focused a lot on having really international, local, authentic content,” Adams said. That means not only making sure users can use the product in their local language, “but also when they get to the home page, seeing templates that are relevant to them, talking about their vacation next week, issues and culture they deal with, that has pictures of the people they would see on the bus next to them on their way to work. All this authentic local experience has been vital to our international growth. And international growth has been Canva’s story.”
Canva’s top market is the US, and Adams said Brazil and India follow closely behind. Indonesia and the Philippines are two of the company’s top growth markets.
Generative AI will provide users with more and smarter content choices. In October, Canva announced a $200 million commitment over the next three years to pay creators who consent to having their content used to train the company’s AI models. Adams said that so far, only 0.0005% of creators have opted out.
