Canva courts enterprise in platform overhaul
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The news: Canva, the all-in-one visual communication platform, has unveiled a major overhaul of its platform at its first international Canva Create event in Los Angeles. The company introduced a range of new workplace products and services, including Canva Enterprise.
The numbers: Canva currently has more than 185 million monthly active users, 20 million paying subscribers and generates over $2.3 billion in annualised revenue. Since the introduction of Canva's Visual Suite 18 months ago, more than 95 million new users have joined the platform.
The context: The enterprise announcement comes ahead of Canva's much anticipated IPO, which is expected to happen as early as next year.
What they said: "We are excited to introduce a revamped Canva experience and a suite of new products to empower every organisation to design," said Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva.
"As demand for visual content soars, navigating organisational complexity is more challenging than ever. We democratised the design ecosystem in our first decade and now look forward to unifying the fragmented ecosystems of design, AI, and workflow tools for every organisation in our second decade."
Reporter's view: VC and startup correspondent Bronwen Clune writes:
Canva Create has become a showcase event for Australia's most successful startup, but this year's event has special significance as it sets itself up for its much anticipated IPO. This is the first year the event has been held in the US, where it will list on the NASDAQ.
The event also serves as a launch of its enterprise product, a segment of the market the company has not specifically targeted before. This sets up Canva to take on the incumbent in the enterprise sector Adobe more aggressively.
According to Canva, it is already used by teams across 95% of Fortune 500 companies.
Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Olbrecht told media at an event prior to the launch that “going wall to wall inside enterprises means that you need to be a great tool for every single profession inside that enterprise.” He called the launch of its enterprise product one of the biggest in Canva’s history.
To get the ball rolling on growing its slice of that enterprise pie Canva is targeting four initial areas where it mostly like has strong inroads: marketing, sales, human resources and creatives.
“When you're forming a company you have two different paths,” Olbrect remarked. “You have created a product for everyone or you have created a product for enterprise, and those two entry points look incredibly different. We chose to democratise design by creating a product for everyone and empowering everyone to essentially take what's in their head and turn it into a fantastic design.” Now they are focusing on enterprise, referring to it as the second phase of Canva's journey.
Olbrecht said the enterprise product launch had been two years in the making and was driven by demand from customers.
But it’s hard not to read it also as a clear pitch to those with the deep pockets in the US financial markets for whom enterprise is a love language.
The source: Canva PR
