(Oct 31): Canva Inc launched new artificial intelligence (AI) tools and integrated recent acquisitions into its main product suite, ramping up its speed of new rollouts, as it seeks to lure users away from rival Adobe Inc.
Australia-based Canva is releasing its own foundational AI model for design, which allows users to create and edit posters, short videos, slogans or presentations within seconds with simple conversational prompts. Its new suite of tools, launched at a company event in Sydney on Thursday, comes just a few months after a major product launch in April.
“We’ve increased the velocity to two big product events a year. And with headcount relatively flat, we’ve gotten a lot more efficient,” chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht said in an interview. “Using AI in our work has made product velocity really speed up, and increased the productivity of every product and engineering person.”
The company, Australia’s highest-profile tech startup, is making its Affinity suite of creative software — which it acquired for several hundred million dollars last year — free for all. Affinity is popular with Mac users and part of a spate of acquisitions that Canva has made in recent months, that are now being integrated into its main product suite. Canva offers many of its web-based services for free, charging fees for more advanced features and capabilities.
“We really want to see the professional designers in organisations and the regular knowledge worker work hand-in-hand and for that collaboration to be seamless. Ultimately the more they work together, the more people will end up needing Canva licences,” Obrecht said. “If Affinity is more compatible, hopefully they’ll drop their Adobe subscription anyway.”
Canva is locked in a battle for users with creative software leader Adobe, which has also been churning out new improvements to its image-generating model Firefly. Adobe’s shares have lost more than 20% of their value this year, as investors worry that AI advancements are being more effectively harnessed by rivals like Canva. Many other business application makers, such as Salesforce Inc, are facing similar concerns about disruption due to AI-native startups.
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Closely held Canva is banking on AI tools to accelerate revenue growth and help the company gear up for a highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO). It recently hired former Zoom Video Communications Inc chief financial officer Kelly Steckelberg as its top financial executive, in a sign that its nearing a public listing.
The company will do an “IPO within two years, but there’s no date set yet,” Obrecht said.
Last valued at US$42 billion (RM176.11 billion) in a share sale, Canva has US$3.5 billion in annualised revenue and over 260 million monthly active users, according to the company. It’s also pushing aggressively into Adobe’s core enterprise space, winning contracts with global brands including Stripe, LinkedIn, Snowflake and Pinterest. Meanwhile, the company is also looking at acquisitions to grow.
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“We’ve got a billion dollars in the bank, so we are open to acquisitions,” Obrecht said. “But it’s hard to integrate companies, so we’re very, very selective.”
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