‘Biggest transformation yet’: Canva launches Canva AI 2.0
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The news: Canva has launched Canva AI 2.0, transforming the platform from a design tool with AI features into a conversational, agentic system where users can brief, build, and publish work entirely through natural language — without clicking into individual tools.
The numbers: Canva now has more than 250 million monthly active users and over 31 million paying subscribers, up 4 million from the prior year.
The company closed the year at over USD4 billion ($5.6 billion) in annualised revenue, representing more than 40% growth.
According to research from Andreessen Horowitz, it is the third most-used AI platform in the world and the fastest-growing in customer spend on AI products among leading software companies.
The context: Announced ahead of the company’s flagship Canva Create event in Los Angeles, the product update introduces persistent memory, background scheduling, third-party connectors, web research, and a new orchestration layer that coordinates Canva’s full suite in response to a single prompt.
The launch is the visible result of a two-year platform rebuild that Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht described at a pre-media briefing as an identity transformation.
“Until now, Canva has been a design platform with AI tools,” he said. “Now we become an AI platform with design tools.”
That shift required re-engineering the existing Canva product from the ground up, with every feature converted into an API call accessible by an agentic AI layer.
“We had to give our agentic AI the understanding of what to call, when and which to call,” Obrecht said. “This can do things in different ways.”
The rebuild was made possible by Canva’s 2024 acquisition of Leonardo.Ai, which seeded what is now a research division of more than 120 people under Canva Original Research and Exploration (CORE).
The division’s first generation of models took over two years to develop; today, new models are being trained, evaluated and deployed in as little as a month.
Canva claims its proprietary models are up to 7x faster and 30x cheaper than comparable frontier alternatives — Canva Proteus (style transfer) is 2x faster and 23x cheaper, Canva Lucid Origin (image generation) is 5x faster and 30x cheaper, and Canva I2V (image to video) is 7x faster and 17x cheaper.
Co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams said Canva’s competitive positioning — as the only platform sitting at the intersection of creativity and productivity — makes it uniquely placed to bring agentic AI to a mainstream audience.
Where tools like Claude and OpenAI’s products remain the domain of early adopters, Canva’s 265 million users represent the mass market that agentic AI has not yet reached.
“We’re not at the forefront of tech trying to push things to the edge,” Obrecht said. “We’re going to bring that full power to our users — just like we did with design.”
The product ships with a set of connectors — Slack, Notion, Zoom, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar at launch — allowing Canva AI to draw on a user’s existing data to generate content.
As part of the launch, Canva also deepened its partnership with Anthropic, bringing Canva’s Design Engine and Visual Suite directly into Claude. Users can now import artefacts from Claude and ChatGPT directly into Canva for editing and publishing.
The update launches as a research preview, rolling out initially to the first one million users who discover it on the Canva homepage.
The author travelled to Canva Create as a guest of Canva.
The sources: Canva media release, Canva media briefing
