Behind Canva's big bets on AI and enterprise
Canva is not yet a public company, but with the success of so many VC funds riding on it, it almost operates under the pressure of one.
On Thursday Canva pulled the wraps off its much anticipated AI-powered Magic Studio, an incredibly ambitious and admittedly impressive set of products it “created to supercharge the way teams create and scale visual content”, according to CEO Melanie Perkins.
The new AI features include “Magic Design”, a tool that can generate custom on-brand designs across many formats, "Magic Switch" which can automatically swap the type, dimensions and language of designs, and “Magic Write”, an AI-powered copywriting assistant similar to ChatGPT.
Canva is not yet a public company, but with so many Australian VCs invested in it and set to realise enormous gains when that IPO happens, it almost operates under the pressure of one in the local ecosystem. There are billions of dollars riding on its continued success, including a decent sized chunk of Australian superannuation savings.
AI is unsurprisingly the current VC zeitgeist and has breathed new life into incumbent legacy tech companies like Microsoft and Adobe, which Canva disrupted 10 years ago with its ease of use.
But, Adobe was early to steal some of the AI spotlight with the launch of Adobe Firefly in March. In an unlikely coincidence, Magic Studio was announced the same month and boasted substantially more features along with integration from a number of popular AI image models. It was a clear message to Adobe that Canva is not done disrupting it yet.
Canva’s approach to the integration of AI is an interesting one, and the latest suite of products has it billing itself as “the first all-in-one suite of design AI tools”. Canva has had AI in its product since 2019 when it started working with Austrian startup Kaleido, which it then acquired the following year.
Magic Studio has been built by Canva’s own in-house AI team which has trained its own models, as well as through partnerships with foundational models from OpenAI and Stable Diffusion.
While not much that Magic Studio offers can’t be done elsewhere, Canva brings a lot of the features that other AI products offer and puts them all together in one place.
