Canva Launches ‘Magic’ AI Tools For Its Design Software’s 125 Million Users

The 10-year-old Australian startup, led by Melanie Perkins, said it had reached $1.6 billion in annual revenue and also unveiled brand-focused features for 6 million team accounts.

Not long after CEO Melanie Perkins launched Canva, investors said Canva was missing out on an entire market that the design software startup’s pitch deck could address. She refused to give one.

“I figured eventually everyone would create some form of visual content and would use Canva,” said Perkins. Forbes. “And still the question is, ‘How big can it get?’ And I think that’s still my answer.”

In 10 years, not everyone in the world uses Canva, but she can expect a fast-growing chunk. Currently, more than 125 million people use Canva’s design software tools every month, an increase of 35 million in the last six months. At that time, Canva began overhauling its product from a software tool for graphic designers to a broader, team-friendly suite of tools including collaborative documents, virtual whiteboards, and website creation. Now, the company is announcing a range of additional products for its business brands and today’s topic, artificial intelligence.

At Thursday’s event in Sydney, which it expects to livestream to one million remote viewers, Canva announced a range of AI features, including ‘Magic’, which allows people to create personalized design templates from images or styles. Magic Presentation, which allows you to create slideshow-style presentations at the prompt, and Magic Write, a copywriting tool. Canva users can also use AI software to identify the location of images, adding or removing elements and translating them into additional languages ​​with just a few clicks.

Founded in 2012 by Perkins, husband Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, Canva has grown from an overlooked Australian start-up to a global phenomenon with Perkins on the cover. Forbes December 2019. After raising funds at a hefty valuation of $40 billion in September 2021 (Perkins and Obrecht pledged to donate “most” of their personal fortunes to the Canva Foundation), the company’s value was later reduced by some investors to approx. It was cut by $25 billion in a setback in the tech market.Since the peak value was announced, the company has said it has more than doubled its monthly users, the same total in the last 30 days after taking five years to reach 10 million users. Annual revenue is now at $1.6 billion, up from $1 billion by 2021.

On the brand side, Canva’s new tools make it easier for companies to set their preferred colors, fonts, and other controls. You can also easily update logos across your team’s various designs with a single click, and even alert creators when their work doesn’t align well with templates or brand guidelines. It comes as the company continues to push its teams and businesses, along with other requested feature enhancements, such as the ability to add gradients, layers, and images to alt text. Perkins said real-time collaboration capabilities were a major driver of growth. The company says 6 million teams are currently using Canva, including American Airlines, Marriott, Salesforce and Zoom.

Meanwhile, Canva’s AI announcement comes as it is expected to respond to the recent AI product boom driven by the popularity of products such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. Other established startup “unicorns,” such as collaboration software makers Coda and Notion, have recently launched their own AI capabilities, while a wave of new startups, such as buzz storytelling app Tome, have garnered early interest in their own AI-infused tools.

Canva has been working extensively on AI tools since 2019, Perkins said when he started working with Austrian startup Kaleido AI on drag-and-drop background removal from videos and images. The following year he took over Kaleido and announced the move. early 2021. To build the Magic tool, Perkins said Canva’s own AI team worked with OpenAI and Stable Diffusion’s underlying models, as well as training itself.

But by releasing Magic right now, Canva is firmly in line with the zeitgeist. Big players like Microsoft and Adobe recently announced the introduction of AI tools into their core products in their Office suites (turning Word documents into PowerPoint presentations with one click). create image (Adobe’s new Firefly creation tool). “There will always be things that come out in trendy, fun ways for people to play with. But people have to achieve their goals. You have to achieve certain results,” said Perkins.

When asked what Canva’s growing automation and AI tools mean for graphic designers and other creative professionals who use the software, Perkins said that these tools could save time on mundane and repetitive tasks like logo replacement. I was optimistic that it would. “I think brands will start asking agencies for different things and they will start asking different things for graphic designers,” she said.

Perkins, who has been building Canva for more than 10 years, claims that the company’s pace of innovation is accelerating despite Canva’s size and the expectations of its global user base. “We built the platform for the first 10 years and now we are really excited to build the magic for the next 10 years,” she said. On the competition: “I think it’s really important to focus on our own racing and entertaining our community. That way we will be fine.”