Enterprise roll-out "one of the biggest launches in Canva's history" as ARR hits $2.2b

After revealing that Canva's number of monthly active users had risen by 8.8 per cent since December to 185 million, and that 20 million paid subscribers were generating more than US$2.2 billion ($3.3 billion) in annualised revenue, co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht described the enterprise offering as "one of the biggest launches in Canva’s history".

"This is a complete workspace where enterprises can really come in and scale their on-brand visual content and do that at a scale you've never seen before," Obrecht said at a press conference in the lead-up to Canva Create in Los Angeles.

"Essentially this means you can manage an organisation of 20 up to 200,000 with multiple different brands and multiple different needs, and harness that creativity and achieve more goals with less friction with this new enterprise SKU (stock keeping unit).

"This has been the combination of about two years work really focusing on making visual communication faster, easier and cheaper for large-scale organisations."

Obrecht noted that 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies were already using Canva at scale, citing Procter & Gamble as one example whereby hundreds of different brands can be incredibly difficult to manage at scale.

"Canva for Enterprise allows organisations to do that with all the security and trust they need for such a large scale and important projects," he said.

"We’re already demonstrating huge efficiencies in these organisations. FedEx has decreased brand review submissions by 77 per cent and increased productivity workdays; saved over 33,000 hours by implementing Canva and allowing a lot of their design to scale.

"Expedia rolled out a full rebrand using Canva which is now saving them over 160 hours per week by utilising our branded templates."

Artificial intelligence (AI) products launched recently by Canva have now been used more than 6.5 billion times, with co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins highlighting that while generative AI has taken the world by storm over the last couple of years, "it's an area that we've been investing in very heavily for the last five".

"But AI tools are also very fragmented, so there's a different tool popping up every other day," she said.

"Having texts and videos and images and coding and 3D and speech means a whole other new tool to learn, and a whole other platform to understand all the nuances of every time you want to design something new, which is obviously very challenging. 

"All of this creates an extraordinary amount of organisational complexity as people need to plan, design, store, collaborate, publish, promote, print, measure using different tools, and having to navigate all of these different systems."

Perkins said one of Canva's values was to "make complex things simple", and the company planned to do just that in its next chapter.

"We are taking the three core challenges that organisations face - the exponential design needs across every profession, the need to integrate AI tools, and the very complex workforce and launching a simple integrated solution for all of them, all within Canva, which we are extraordinarily excited to bring to the world." 

Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams highlighted the launch of new tailored tools for different professions, kicking off with offerings for sales, human resources, marketing and creatives.

"Marketers have been huge friends of Canva for many years, but their jobs have only gotten more complicated as teams have grown, as budgets have grown, as they need to scale around the world," Adams said.

"The needs that they have inside a visual content tool like Canva need to change as well. We've thought deeply about what marketing teams need and what in particular they need to scale their content."

Adams noted the creation of 'Bulk Create' for marketers, who could connect data within a CSV file with one design that they have in Canva, and with the click of a button integrate all the data fields into the design, multiplying that to produce all the content needed across different channels.

"We're also introducing a notion that we call work kits for each of these professions. Work kits are bundled packages of content and templates that we have collaborated with some of the world's leading professional leaders," he said.

"Inside the marketing work kit, marketers all over the world will be able to access world-class campaign management, lifecycle marketing, social media, and go-to-market strategy templates."

Obrecht noted that for the sales work kit, a user can plug their sales CRM (customer relationship management) platform and connect that with a Canva design to "essentially automate the creation of content on a cyclical basis or on a batch basis".

He cited one example whereby Salesforce data can be connected into a quarterly review to be sent to a client, giving them all the data they need to assess their account.

"By automating all of this very manual work, we give sellers time to do what they like to do best, which is actually sell and make their customers happy," Obrecht said.

"Another key feature we're launching is called Canva Record - a very original name we gave this one - that essentially allows you to record a presentation, package that up and send it to a customer, you can send it internally to a colleague. 

"It really allows for the efficient asynchronous collaboration and delivery of content with pretty much anyone. We've been getting huge use out of this internally and it also provides full analytics on the back end so you can actually see how far along someone has read your presentation and gives you a bunch of other data in that regard."

Perkins said the work kit for human resources would also apply to internal communications teams, and to illustrate its utility she brought up her own Canva account.

"You can see here the Canvanaut hub, which is all the things that our team of 4,500 people around the world need to know to be able to come in and immediately find out their growth journey or our policies or supporting their wellbeing," she said.

"Canva really starts to become the centralised knowledge base for teams, which we're extraordinarily excited about, and we're taking that one step further with Canva Courses as well.

"With Canva courses, not only can you create the content but then you can enable teams to navigate through it.

"We are extraordinarily excited about what this is going to unlock for HR and comms professionals around the world so they can craft company-wide comms and really bring the true power of visual communication to those communications."

Adams highlighted updates for creatives including an upgrade to the Magic Write tool that allows for creating "a whole series of custom tones of voice that you might need for different aspects of your brand".

"If you're sending an email out to your external customers, or you're talking to your internal team, you can define a different tone of voice that Magic Write can use to generate content for you or summarise the content that you already have," he said.

"We've also focused on a fantastic range of work kits for creatives, including creative briefs, creative production templates, project management templates, ideation templates, and brand strategy templates."

Some of the lift for this particular target market will also come from Canva's acquisition of designer software suite Affinity earlier year this year, with capabilities that will also be made available to a broader demographic.

"We recently brought it into the fold here at Canva because we truly believe in servicing the full spectrum of design talent, whether you're a professional designer or a non-designer who's never used it before," he said.

"Affinity is a world-leading suite and we're very happy to be announcing at Canva Create that we're actually making their entire toolset available to students, teachers and nonprofits, entirely for free. This brings it in line with the existing Canva tool which we offer for nonprofits and education users.

"Affinity really defines our vision of creating and scaling visual content of all types - professional designers will be able to create professional assets on Affinity, and they'll be able to scale them on Canva to their audiences and to their internal team members."