Canva Launches ‘Magic’ AI Tools for 125 Million Software Users

The ten-year-old Australian startup, led by Melanie Perkins, said it has reached $1.6 billion in annual revenue and has also unveiled brand-focused features for its 6 million group accounts.

Not long after CEO Melanie Perkins launched Canva, investors told her she was missing out on the generally addressable market of design software startup Pitch Decks. She refused to give one.

“I was like, everybody eventually creates some kind of visual content and they use Canva,” says Perkins. Forbes. “The question is still, ‘How big can we get?’ That’s what it says. Again, I think this is my answer.

Ten years from now, not everyone in the world will be using Canva — but she can count on a fast-growing segment. Currently, more than 125 million people use Canva’s design software tools every month, an increase of 35 million in the last six months. Since then, Canva has undergone a product overhaul, evolving from a software tool for graphic designers to a comprehensive, team-friendly suite of tools to help create collaborative documents, virtual whiteboards, and websites. Now the company is announcing various additional products for business products and the topic of the day is artificial intelligence.

At Thursday’s event in Sydney, which Canva is expected to broadcast to a million remote viewers, the company announced a range of AI features called ‘Magic’, including Magic Design, which lets people create personalized design templates from images or styles. Magic Presentation, which can create slideshow-style presentations from Quiz and Magic Write, a copywriting tool. Canva users can also use AI software to identify areas in images and add or remove elements with two clicks, as well as translate into additional languages.

In the year Forbes In December 2019. After raising funds at a high valuation of $40 billion in September 2021 (Perkins and Obrecht have pledged their personal wealth to the foundation of Canva), the company’s valuation was later lowered to $25 billion by some investors. A pullback in the tech market. Since the announcement of the high valuation, the company has more than doubled monthly users, after taking five years to reach 10 million users, adding the same amount in the last 30 days. Annual revenue now stands at $1.6 billion, up from $1 billion by the end of 2021.

On the brand side, Canva’s new tools make it easy for companies to set their preferred colors, fonts and other controls. They also make it easy to update the logo of all of the team’s unique designs with one click, and alert creators if their work doesn’t quite fit the template or brand guidelines. Along with other requested feature improvements, such as the ability to add gradients, layers and images to alt text, they come as the company continues to push into teams and enterprises. Perkins said real-time collaboration capabilities have played a big role in the development; Six million teams currently use Canva, including American Airlines, Marriott, Salesforce and Zoom, the company said.

Its AI announcements come as Canva is expected to respond to recent AI product growth fueled by the popularity of products like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. Other established startup “unicorns” like collaboration software makers Coda and Notion have recently launched their own AI features, while a wave of new startups like buzzy storytelling app Tome have found early interest in their own AI-powered tools.

Canva has been working extensively on AI tools since 2019, Perkins said, when it began working with Austrian startup Kaleido AI on drag-and-drop background removal from videos and images. The next year he found Caledon and announced his move In early 2021. To build the magic tools, Canva’s own in-house AI team worked with OpenAI and Stable Diffusion’s foundational models and provided its own training, Perkins said.

Announcing the magic now, however, places Canva firmly in the zeitgeist. Giants like Microsoft and Adobe have recently introduced AI tools into their core products from the Office Suite (turning Word documents into PowerPoint presentations with a click). Image generation (Adobe’s new Firefly authoring tool). “There’s going to be things that come in the way that people play in a trendy and fun way, but people have to achieve their goals. They have to achieve certain results,” Perkins said.

Asked what Canva’s increasing automation and AI tools mean for graphic designers and other creative professionals who use the software, Perkins hoped such tools would allow them to spend less time on mundane, repetitive tasks, such as changing logos. “I think brands are starting to ask different things from agencies and different things from graphic designers,” she said.

With more than a decade to build Canva, Perkins says the pace of innovation at the company is growing faster, not slower, despite its size and global user base. “We spent the first 10 years building the platform, and now we’re excited to spend the next 10 years building the magic,” she says. Regarding the competition: “I think it’s very important to focus on our own race and make our community happy. “If we do that, we’ll be fine.”