Canva’s CEO on its big pivot to AI enterprise software
Canva just rewrote its entire product. From 'design platform with AI tools' to 'AI platform with design tools'—and it's already in 1M hands.
Why it matters
Canva is shifting from a design tool to an enterprise automation platform, with Canva AI 2.0 enabling users to describe work in natural language and have the system orchestrate across all design and data tools. This positions Canva directly against Adobe, Microsoft, and Meta in the race to own the enterprise creative automation layer.
The key facts
12 to knowCanva AI 2.0 in research preview with 1M users access at Canva Create
Company shifting positioning: 'from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools'
$4B annualized revenue; $500M enterprise (100% YoY growth)
95% of Fortune 500 using Canva; thousands of employees per company
Canva now 5,000 employees (up from 4,500 two years ago)
Hundreds of people working on Canva AI 2.0 project for multiple years
Magic Layers (proprietary model) hit 8M uses in 4 weeks post-launch
100-person internal research team focused on design AI
Partners with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google; uses proprietary models for domain-specific tasks
$100/month AI Pass offered free to first 1M users
Features: conversational editing, agentic orchestration of Canva tools, Slack/Gmail/calendar integrations, iterative refinement vs. one-shot generation
Affirm free tier remains free; Affinity product has 5M+ downloads since announcement
Go to the source
The Verge Techtheverge.com
Publisher excerpt: Today, I’m talking with Melanie Perkins, founder and CEO of Canva, a popular online design tool. I always enjoy talking with Melanie. She was last on the show a couple of years ago, just as the AI revolution was coming to the worlds of art and design. At the time, Canva had escaped a lot of the…