Australian graphic design firm Canva believes it is in a uniquely healthier position to withstand industry headwinds as it begins a European expansion.
Canva opened its new European headquarters in London the previous month as it competes with Adobe and Microsoft to gain the attention of individual users and enterprises to its design suite.
Co-founder and CEO of Canva, Melanie Perkins said, “The nine-year-old company is well-placed amid wider pressures. Being profitable for the last six years, having a strong cash balance, all of those things have been extraordinarily important.”
Canva offers both free and paid tools for designing websites, social content, and presentations had annualized revenues of approximately $1.5 billion in the year to May.
Canva Said, “The Company also has $700 million in cash reserves.”
Perkins said, “We’ve made our paid products extremely affordable, so regardless of what’s happening in the macroeconomic environment, people are moving to Canva rather than away. We’ve certainly seen that happen and play out over the last couple of years as that economic uncertainty has kicked in.”
The growing interest in artificial intelligence has coincided with the Canva’s rollout of a new suite of AI-powered publishing, editing, and design features. This attracted 10 million new users to Canva in the span of a month.
Canva has teamed up with OpenAI for its Magic Write tool. This tool auto-generates full bodies of text for presentations as well as blog posts based on even prompts of a few words.
Perkins said, “The term magic has been what we’ve referred to things as for almost a decade, and so that branding has been something we’ve carried through. But the company is moving ahead cautiously; over-indexing towards trust and safety.”
Perkins added, “The tools are intended to streamline and simplify design processes and to supercharge what people can do.”
“Every industry goes through radical transformations. Certainly, our industry’s not been distant from that. As new technology becomes available, the whole industry has to adapt and everyone has to learn new skills. I think that’s just happened time and time again,” Perkins concluded.
