‘Biggest revamp in a decade’: Canva takes on enterprise market

The Australian tech darling has released a suite of new products aimed at attracting more paying subscribers in the lucrative enterprise market as investors anticipate a US listing.

From left: Canva co-founders Cameron Adams, Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins. Picture: John Feder

Australian visual communications company Canva says it has redesigned its entire platform to take on the lucrative enterprise market and turbocharge its revenue as investors anticipate a much-hyped listing.

The tech darling has launched a suite of new products at its annual Create showcase in Los Angeles – the first time it has moved the event from Australia. The revamp is aimed at attracting more paying subscribers across the world’s biggest companies.

The new offerings include Canva Courses, which allows companies to make their own training modules; Canva Enterprise, a product that builds on its Pro and Teams versions; and Canva Work Kits, a set of tools and templates for different teams within an organisation; as well as significant upgrades to its Visual Suite and Magic Studio.

It comes ahead of a potential Nasdaq listing, which co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams said would be a “natural evolution” for the company – which is valued at $US26bn ($39bn). But he and his co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht won’t be rushed.

Ms Perkins said the new products coincided with the biggest overhaul of Canva in a decade.

“We are excited to introduce a revamped Canva experience and a suite of new products to empower every organisation to design,” she said. “As demand for visual content soars, navigating organisational complexity is more challenging than ever. We democratised the design ecosystem in our first decade and now look forward to unifying the fragmented ecosystems of design, AI, and workflow tools for every organisation in our second decade.”

Head of product Robert Kawalsky said Canva already counted 95 per cent of Fortune 500 companies as customers, which had been achieved mainly through “organic growth” – with businesses progressing from Canva’s free platform to its subscription versions.

“We work with some of the world’s largest organisations … companies like Coke and Zoom, Salesforce, they have quite complex needs. They have multiple brands, complex organisational structures, they want to make sure that content is being shared with the right team in the right way, at the right time,” Mr Kawalsky said.

“So we’ve built out under this enterprise cloud the ability to manage not just teams in a simple way but with the complexity that large organisations have, so they can deploy it across all departments and feel comfortable about how it works across an organisation.”

Canva Enterprise builds on its Pro and Teams versions.

Canva says it has more than 180 million monthly active users and generates more than $2.3bn in annual revenue. To highlight the demand for visual content, in the 18 months since Canva introduced its workplace-focused Visual Suite, it has attracted more than 95 million new users – a figure that previously took the company nearly nine years to achieve.

It is aiming to capitalise on the findings of its latest Visual Economy Report which found 92 per cent of business leaders expect employees in non-design roles to possess design skills.

Mr Kawalsky said Canva’s new products were designed to put the “power of design in the hands of the 99 per cent of employees without professional design training”.

He said most of the company’s revenue came from its pro version but “over time there will be a huge amount of growth on the enterprise side”.

“Employees are using Canva already, and what we’re really doing is allowing organisations to sort of put their arms around that usage and sort of empower more people and really be able to give them tools.

“At a sort of foundational level, what we do now for organisations is bring the vast array of tools they’re using in their different workflows together into one consolidated platform, and also consolidating the fragmented AI ecosystem … so organisations can have the confidence that the teams are empowered to create, but they can consolidate spend, they can consolidate the proliferation of tools and also consolidate the IP which can sit across maybe many different tools.”

While Canva Enterprise is “layering” on top of its existing products, Canva Courses represents a new area for the company, which will see it enter the organisational development and corporate training space.

“What’s happened today is that much of that training content is produced in Canva because it’s visual, it’s engaging and compelling,” Mr Kawalsky said.

“But what you haven’t been able to do is allow the organisation to consume that content in Canva. And that’s what we’re doing with Canva courses.

“You’ll be able to … build an entire course that you can then assign to your organisation, they can move through it, you can track their progress.”

Canva Work Kits offers curated collections of hundreds of craft-specific templates, from presentations to documents, built to enable teams to scale their output with “easy-to-access tools”.

Rebecca Janes, creative designer and environmental branding strategist at FedEx – one of Canva’s biggest customers – said the company had provided a “far-reaching tool across FedEx”.

“With Canva’s simple interface and vast selection of templates and graphics, our teams are able to quickly and easily create eye-catching visuals that help elevate the quality and effectiveness of our communications,” Ms Janes said.

The new offerings come two months after Canva made its biggest acquisition, taking over UK-based Affinity – a graphic design software firm focused on professionals and a rival to Adobe.

Other deals include Pexels and Pixabay in 2019, Kaleido, Smartmockups and SlidesCarnival in 2021 and Flourish in 2022. The string of deals prompted Canva to open their first European headquarters in London in 2023.

It also made some of its staff instant millionaires after the Australian tech darling finalised a share sale worth $3.6bn earlier this year.

The share sale was oversubscribed by 150 per cent on its initial target, reaping $US2.4bn ($3.6bn) as the visual communications company prepared for its next phase of growth.