I made Canva A very successful business model based on the idea that graphic design should be accessible to everyone. The Australian company has raised $560 million since its founding 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 present in 190 countries and over 100 languages, and has over 170 million active users. But despite its rapid growth and international presence, the company has had some successes this year. A group of Canva investors — such as Blackbird, T. Rowe Price And Frank Templeton – It reduced the value of the company, which saw a peak of $40 billion a year later $200 million fundraising in 2021. Blackbird’s valuation of the company fell to $25.6 billion, and T. Rowe Price to about $13 billion in June.
It might be easy to think that Canva got these devaluations, but in reality, it was mainly about market sentiment. 2020 and 2021 saw a massive expansion in multiples that have since contracted, prompting investors to reevaluate. Regardless, by all accounts, Canva is still the deca of the century.
Adams told TechCrunch+ that he’s not worried about the drop in value, however. “This year has been one of our best years for growth. We’ve almost doubled across most of our metrics. We’ve had 80 million active users on board since this time last year, so it’s been working in our favor.” “That’s what we’re focused on: more users, better product, revenue growth.”
Over the past 12 months, Canva has released a slew of generative AI products that Adams said give the company and its users a new ability to build features and design work that might not have been considered five years ago. “For us, AI will 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 generative AI bandwagon since ChatGPT disrupted the consumer-facing space in November 2022, much to the surprise and skepticism of many journalists. But with Canva, generative AI is different. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a better technology to boost Canva’s user growth and revenue generation. Content is the foundation of the company’s business, and it’s the main reason Canva has been able to scale to such dizzying heights and across global borders. This is because the focus has always been on providing images and templates that suit a specific geographic audience.
“One of the keys to our growth is that we are always thinking across borders internationally,” Adams said. Its library contains more than 120 million pieces of content in Canva, sourced widely from individual contributors and photography houses.
“We have placed a great deal of emphasis on providing global, local and authentic content,” Adams said. This means not only ensuring that people can use the product in their local language, “but also when they get to the home page, they see forms that are exactly relevant to them, that talk about the holiday they are going on next week, and the issues and problems they are facing.” The culture they interact with, which contains images of the people they see on the bus next to them on their commute to work. All that authentic local experience has been crucial to our international growth. International growth has been the Canva story.”
Canva’s largest market is the United States, and Adams said Brazil and India follow closely behind. Indonesia and the Philippines are the company’s largest growth markets.
Generative AI will only give users more and smarter content choices. In October, Canva announced a $200 million commitment over the next three years to pay compensation to creators who agree to use their content to train the company’s AI models. So far, only 0.0005% of creators have unsubscribed, Adams said.