Canva, the Australian startup that’s won over 265 million users with its design software, is launching a new suite of tools that combine visual creation and workflow automation, run by AI agents that respond to conversational prompts.
Dubbed Canva AI 2.0, the new platform of services lets users create and alter designs using natural language, and connects to other services like Gmail, Slack, and Zoom in order to generate new content. The new platform also boasts persistent memory, allowing Canva to learn how people work, and can automatically update designs as brand imagery gets tweaked.
“We had to rearchitect the whole Canva platform,” Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s cofounder and chief operating officer, tells Fortune.
Canva, founded in 2012, integrated generative AI functions onto its platform in early 2023, just a few months after ChatGPT’s release. (At the time, Fortune noted that the startup was wary of using the term “AI” to advertise its services, preferring the term “magic” instead.)
Obrecht describes Canva’s previous AI services—generating images and video, or generating a whole presentation—as “a design platform with AI services built on top.” With these new services, Canva hopes to go beyond design to offer more coworking capabilities for users.
For example, the new Canva can crawl the web for breaking tech news overnight, determine what’s trending, then create—and even schedule—social media posts on its own. “It can help you complete your whole job,” Obrecht says.
Canva’s rise in AI
Canva has quietly become one of the world’s most used consumer AI apps. Canva is the world’s third most used generative AI web product by monthly active users, behind Google Gemini and ahead of China’s DeepSeek chatbot, according to an analysis by VC firm a16z.
Canva’s massive user base has pushed the company to think carefully about how to offer AI services without blowing a hole in its budget. “There’s only so long you can fund your user base with VC-funded dollars,” Obrecht says. “With 265 million users on a monthly basis hammering our services, we have to own our models and we have to own infrastructure that serves our models.”
Canva has acquired several other AI startups in recent years, including Leonardo AI, an image-generating platform, in 2024. Just last week, Canva acquired Simtheory, a platform for building agents, and Ortto, a marketing automation company.
These investments have helped Canva produce its own foundational AI models, rather than solely relying on models from third parties. The startup claims that its AI services are sevenfold faster and 30-fold cheaper than “comparable” frontier models. Obrecht adds that Canva is also trying to explore how to tap device processing power for AI, rather than go into the cloud.
Canva will offer multiple tiers for pricing. Free users will get access to Canva’s basic AI, with a small number of credits for premium models. Pricing then escalates through different tiers all the way up to $100 a month, which Obrecht describes as “almost all-you-can-eat”—even if there are still some limits on Canva’s most powerful models.
Software-as-a-service companies have been hit hard in recent months by investor fears about competition from AI developers like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Design software developers are particularly threatened by AI, as ChatGPT and Claude increasingly take on the ability to generate video and images.
Shares in Adobe, which makes Photoshop and other design and publishing software, are down by more than 30% over the past 12 months. Shares in design startup Figma have performed even worse, losing almost 85% of their value since the company’s $1.2 billion IPO.
Canva, which is still privately held, claims it generated $3.5 billion in revenue last year. Obrecht, in an interview with Bloomberg last November, suggested an IPO was “probably imminent in the next couple of years.”
Obrecht notes that, despite the so-called AI scare trade, Canva’s shares are still trading at its last valuation of $42 billion, reached during an employee stock sale last year. “We’ve fortunately avoided being hit by that SaaS apocalypse,” he adds.
But he’s aware that rapidly changing technology can pose a threat to Canva if executives aren’t careful. “If we’re not going to disrupt ourselves, then we’re going to be disrupted,” he says.
