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India is the fourth largest market and ranks number two in AI usage for design software company Canva, which unveiled its biggest platform shift into an AI-native stack powered by its own foundational models. India is also emerging as a top user of Affinity - its professional editing product suite meant to rival Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
The $42 billion Australian company, which has scaled to 265 million monthly users and $4 billion in annualised revenue, is heavily banking on markets like India and Brazil to drive its AI adoption.
The platform has seen significant traction in the country, with over 1 billion designs created in the past 12 months and 3.4 billion designs generated all-time. Popular use cases in India span social media, video, presentations, posters and documents, reflecting broad adoption across individuals and businesses.
Launched in 2013, Canva made its first international debut in India back in 2015, Melanie Perkins, the 38-year old cofounder and chief executive of Canva recalled.
“That was when we actually started to create localized templates. And then over the years, and in particular over the last couple of years, we've been really ramping up our Indian investments with our team there, and trying to ensure that templates are really localized to the Indian market,” she said.
Last year, Canva bid Rs 554.48 crore to become the lead sponsor for India’s men’s and women’s cricket teams, but lost the position to Apollo Tyres’ winning bid for Rs 579 crore.
“We were very disappointed,” said cofounder Cliff Obrecht. “We really wanted to be the main sponsor. We had some amazing collaborations, ideas for how we can engage the next generation of cricket fans but that tells you how much we're investing in the Indian markets.”
Canva said it is further strengthening its local ecosystem, with over 500 creators building India-specific content, and through partnerships such as its collaboration with Shark Tank India to support startups with design capabilities. Cofounder Cameron Adams added that localisation is key. “We’ve made sure that when someone in India lands in Canva, it feels truly local with the right content, templates and pricing.”
AI investments
Ahead of its reportedly planned listing on Nasdaq as early as 2026, Canva unveiled Canva 2.0 – the transition from being a “design platform with AI tools” to an “AI platform with design tools,” as it looks to tap the next generation of users.
Canva is already the third most used AI platform globally behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini as well as the fastest-growing in customer spend on AI products among leading software companies, according to research by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Canva started re-architecting its platform back in 2024, with the acquisition of Leonardo AI, an image generation platform. It also decided to step away from costly frontier AI models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic towards investing in its own AI research.
Its AI division has 300 employees including 100 in-house researchers. Canva’s unique “design models” (which solve visual AI problems such as removing background) are up to 7x faster and 30x cheaper than comparable frontier alternatives, which is now becoming its defensible moat.
Competition
Last week, Anthropic debuted Claude Design - seen as a disruption in the design space - that made Figma’s shares drop by around 7.5 per cent, while Adobe saw a smaller but noticeable dip of over 1 per cent.
However, Canva sees this as a tailwind.
“AI is accelerating how content is generated, but that output still needs to be turned into something editable, collaborative, and ready to use. That’s where Canva plays a key role,” the company said in a statement.
Executives say AI is already materially impacting Canva’s growth. Rob Kawalsky, Head of Global Product at Canva told ET, “The amount of AI usage on the platform has tripled in the last 12 months.”
He added that Canva is also seeing strong inbound traffic from large AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude, where AI-generated output is converted to editable output.
Canva’s competitors Figma and Adobe are also redesigning their platforms to integrate agentic workflows. A new cohort of startups such as AI slide-maker Gamma have also demonstrated tremendous growth. However, Canva believes its scale and integrated workflows give it an edge.
“We’re one of the only platforms that combines productivity and creativity at scale,” Adams said. “When we bring AI to that, it creates a unique offering.”
Kawalsky added that Canva’s strength lies in its end-to-end workflow. “You can go from ideation to presentation to communication to analysis, all in one place,” he said.
Business fundamentals
The platform shift has not changed Canva’s core freemium monetization model. But it is also introducing a “universal credit system” to foot the compute bill which is expected to shoot up with the new launch. “We’re complementing our traditional subscription model with a universal credit system,” Kawalsky said. “It introduces consumption into the equation.”
Under this model, users consume a shared pool of AI credits across different tasks. “That flexibility is great for users, but it also means consumption becomes a driver of revenue,” he added.
Adams said that the company is balancing access and cost carefully. He also pointed to optimisation at the model level. “You don’t always need a massive model…smaller, targeted models can deliver quality at much lower cost.”
Transforming Canva into an AI-native system required deep changes to both product and infrastructure. “It’s definitely not trivial to move a product of this scale to be AI-native,” said Danny Wu, Head of AI Products. “We’ve been working towards this moment for many years.”
Many of the ideas powering Canva AI 2.0 were conceived long before the current generative AI boom. For instance, Canva was working with OpenAI’s Dall-E image generation model long before the ChatGPT moment happened in 2022.
Canva is expected to list on the Nasdaq rather than the Australian ASX to access deeper liquidity. In 2024, it hired Zoom CFO Kelly Steckelberg signalling its preparation for public markets. In 2025, it made an employee tender offer which allowed staff to sell up to $3 million in vested equity, a common step taken 12-18 months before a public debut.
“We always remain IPO ready,” Adams said. “The finance and legal teams at Canva always have IPO readiness in mind, but we're in no real rush.”
(The reporter was at the Canva Create event in Los Angeles at the invitation of Canva.)
The $42 billion Australian company, which has scaled to 265 million monthly users and $4 billion in annualised revenue, is heavily banking on markets like India and Brazil to drive its AI adoption.
The platform has seen significant traction in the country, with over 1 billion designs created in the past 12 months and 3.4 billion designs generated all-time. Popular use cases in India span social media, video, presentations, posters and documents, reflecting broad adoption across individuals and businesses.
Launched in 2013, Canva made its first international debut in India back in 2015, Melanie Perkins, the 38-year old cofounder and chief executive of Canva recalled.
“That was when we actually started to create localized templates. And then over the years, and in particular over the last couple of years, we've been really ramping up our Indian investments with our team there, and trying to ensure that templates are really localized to the Indian market,” she said.
Last year, Canva bid Rs 554.48 crore to become the lead sponsor for India’s men’s and women’s cricket teams, but lost the position to Apollo Tyres’ winning bid for Rs 579 crore.
“We were very disappointed,” said cofounder Cliff Obrecht. “We really wanted to be the main sponsor. We had some amazing collaborations, ideas for how we can engage the next generation of cricket fans but that tells you how much we're investing in the Indian markets.”
Canva said it is further strengthening its local ecosystem, with over 500 creators building India-specific content, and through partnerships such as its collaboration with Shark Tank India to support startups with design capabilities. Cofounder Cameron Adams added that localisation is key. “We’ve made sure that when someone in India lands in Canva, it feels truly local with the right content, templates and pricing.”
AI investments
Ahead of its reportedly planned listing on Nasdaq as early as 2026, Canva unveiled Canva 2.0 – the transition from being a “design platform with AI tools” to an “AI platform with design tools,” as it looks to tap the next generation of users.
Canva is already the third most used AI platform globally behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini as well as the fastest-growing in customer spend on AI products among leading software companies, according to research by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Canva started re-architecting its platform back in 2024, with the acquisition of Leonardo AI, an image generation platform. It also decided to step away from costly frontier AI models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic towards investing in its own AI research.
Its AI division has 300 employees including 100 in-house researchers. Canva’s unique “design models” (which solve visual AI problems such as removing background) are up to 7x faster and 30x cheaper than comparable frontier alternatives, which is now becoming its defensible moat.
Competition
Last week, Anthropic debuted Claude Design - seen as a disruption in the design space - that made Figma’s shares drop by around 7.5 per cent, while Adobe saw a smaller but noticeable dip of over 1 per cent.
However, Canva sees this as a tailwind.
“AI is accelerating how content is generated, but that output still needs to be turned into something editable, collaborative, and ready to use. That’s where Canva plays a key role,” the company said in a statement.
Executives say AI is already materially impacting Canva’s growth. Rob Kawalsky, Head of Global Product at Canva told ET, “The amount of AI usage on the platform has tripled in the last 12 months.”
He added that Canva is also seeing strong inbound traffic from large AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude, where AI-generated output is converted to editable output.
Canva’s competitors Figma and Adobe are also redesigning their platforms to integrate agentic workflows. A new cohort of startups such as AI slide-maker Gamma have also demonstrated tremendous growth. However, Canva believes its scale and integrated workflows give it an edge.
“We’re one of the only platforms that combines productivity and creativity at scale,” Adams said. “When we bring AI to that, it creates a unique offering.”
Kawalsky added that Canva’s strength lies in its end-to-end workflow. “You can go from ideation to presentation to communication to analysis, all in one place,” he said.
Business fundamentals
The platform shift has not changed Canva’s core freemium monetization model. But it is also introducing a “universal credit system” to foot the compute bill which is expected to shoot up with the new launch. “We’re complementing our traditional subscription model with a universal credit system,” Kawalsky said. “It introduces consumption into the equation.”
Under this model, users consume a shared pool of AI credits across different tasks. “That flexibility is great for users, but it also means consumption becomes a driver of revenue,” he added.
Adams said that the company is balancing access and cost carefully. He also pointed to optimisation at the model level. “You don’t always need a massive model…smaller, targeted models can deliver quality at much lower cost.”
Transforming Canva into an AI-native system required deep changes to both product and infrastructure. “It’s definitely not trivial to move a product of this scale to be AI-native,” said Danny Wu, Head of AI Products. “We’ve been working towards this moment for many years.”
Many of the ideas powering Canva AI 2.0 were conceived long before the current generative AI boom. For instance, Canva was working with OpenAI’s Dall-E image generation model long before the ChatGPT moment happened in 2022.
Canva is expected to list on the Nasdaq rather than the Australian ASX to access deeper liquidity. In 2024, it hired Zoom CFO Kelly Steckelberg signalling its preparation for public markets. In 2025, it made an employee tender offer which allowed staff to sell up to $3 million in vested equity, a common step taken 12-18 months before a public debut.
“We always remain IPO ready,” Adams said. “The finance and legal teams at Canva always have IPO readiness in mind, but we're in no real rush.”
(The reporter was at the Canva Create event in Los Angeles at the invitation of Canva.)
