Canva

Canva is an Australian visual communication platform that lets users create designs — social media graphics, presentations, documents, videos and more — through drag-and-drop templates, and increasingly through artificial intelligence. Its Magic Studio suite, launched in 2023, added image and video generation, writing assistance, summarisation and design automation to the core editor, and AI features have been central to the company's growth: Canva reported more than 265 million monthly users and about US$4 billion in annual revenue at the end of 2025, and was most recently valued at about US$42 billion.^[2][3]

History

Canva was founded in Perth, Australia, in 2012 by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, and launched publicly in 2013 with a freemium model that made professional-looking design accessible without specialist software.^[1] The company grew into one of Australia's most valuable technology firms and expanded through acquisitions, including the design software Affinity in March 2024 and the generative AI company Leonardo.ai in July 2024 — Canva's eighth acquisition — which brought a team of about 120 researchers and the Phoenix image model into the Magic Studio platform.^[2][4][5] Magic Studio had launched in October 2023 and was used more than seven billion times within its first year, with the company reporting a 40 per cent increase in monthly users of its AI tools.^[2] By early 2026 Canva said AI adoption and referral traffic from large language models were contributing materially to growth, including more than 26 million conversations through Canva's app inside ChatGPT by October 2025.^[3]

Key Features and Technology

Canva's editor combines a template library, brand kits and collaborative editing in the browser. Its AI layer spans Magic Media for text-to-image and text-to-video generation (built partly on Leonardo's models), document summarisation and text generation tools, whiteboard-to-presentation conversion, background removal and object-level photo editing, and template-driven design suggestions. Canva positions the suite as visual AI that works inside existing workflows rather than as a separate tool, and makes it available across free, Pro, Teams and Enterprise tiers; education accounts are free for verified schools and teachers.^[2][3][4]

Applications and Impact

Canva is widely credited with democratising design for non-designers: small businesses, marketing teams, teachers, students and social media sellers use it for everyday visual content. The AI features lowered the skill barrier further, though they have also drawn attention to industry-wide questions about training data, licensing and the sameness of template-driven output; Canva has emphasised its licensed content library and creator payments as points of difference from rivals such as Adobe Firefly, Midjourney and OpenAI's image tools.^[1][2][5]

>See Also

• Adobe Firefly
• Text-to-Image Model
• Midjourney
• AI Watermarking
• Nano Banana