Canva Create: Blockbuster festival could chart new global course

Canva’s blockbuster ‘The Future Is Visual’ event showed how far the Australian startup has come in a decade, with its celebrity co-founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams celebrating new graphic design tools they say have been years in the making.

But the festival could not help but drive questions about Canva’s future, and how the privately-held company, most recently valued at around $32 billion, aims to challenge the market valuation of players like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

SmartCompany joined a coterie of local and international journalists at Canva’s Sydney headquarters this week, touring the company’s gym — including a full Olympic weightlifting set-up — and its sunny Surry Hills rooftop, complete with a built-in pizza oven.

Weights and plates were not the sole reason for our visit (although, admittedly, the pizza was very good).

In casual lunchtime conversations and formal interviews held across Tuesday and Wednesday, Perkins, Obrecht, and Adams shared their views with reporters, opening a window into one of Australia’s most significant corporate exports.

The company’s valuation was front of mind through the festivities.

In August, The Australian Financial Review reported Canva was not spared from the market downturn afflicting tech companies worldwide through 2022, citing one major US investor which wrote down the value of its Canva holdings by 44% from its 2021 peak.

The trio tackled Canva’s financial position early on, turning curiosity over its valuation to its business fundamentals.

In a Tuesday press briefing, Perkins reiterated the company has been profitable since 2017, and now counts in excess of 10 million paying subscribers.

“We are a profitable company, we have a huge cash balance,” Obrecht added, reflecting on its US$700 million in cash reserves.

“So we don’t need to raise any money.”

With that much dry powder in storage, Obrecht added that suppressed valuations “provides some level of opportunity for us” in terms of potential acquisitions.

And, with market jitters turning to genuine fear, Obrecht said Canva’s business model is prepared for a potential economic downturn.

“The fortunate thing is, in times of economic hardship, people turn to Canva, not away from Canva, because people people spend a lot of money — particularly, organisations spend a lot of money — on their visual communications,” he said.

Yet for Canva to achieve its overarching goals, like reaching a total addressable market Perkins describes as the entire world, it is hard to avoid speculation over a potential IPO.

Certainly, across the two days of sit-down briefings and bombastic public presentations, the leadership team gave no explicit indication of public offering plans.

Perkins and Obrecht, the couple at Canva’s core, radiated confidence about the company’s current trajectory, and were happy to focus on the company’s new Visual Worksuite tools.

Still, the Canva Create event, which packed out Hordern Pavilion and streamed worldwide, was an exercise in muscle flexing, with Canva presenting itself as a company capable of making even greater global gains.

And for all the warmth and openness expressed by the leadership team, Canva is still willing to pick its moments when sharing key internal updates.

When questioned on Tuesday about how AI-powered visualisation tools might power Canva’s future releases, co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams mused on how such software can empower creativity, and focused on the company’s new video background removal feature.

But barely 24 hours later, during Wednesday’s blockbuster presentation, product design lead Sally Woellner revealed a new text-to-image app which lets Canva users turn written prompts into graphics through Stable Diffusion technology — confirming Canva’s involvement with AI image generation is already well advanced.

At the end of Wednesday’s dazzling Canva Create presentation, the stage backdrop unexpectedly lifted to reveal a fully-fledged party beyond the riser.

Legions of Canvanauts and the invited guests walked on through, into a landscape the company kept hidden until the last moment.