The Rise of Canva
As for Canva, where Perkins is CEO and Obrecht is chief operating officer: It’s now one of the most influential design platforms on the planet, with 75 million monthly active users who create, on average, 150 designs every second. The company, which is valued at $40 billion, expects to exceed $1 billion in revenue in 2022.
While many unicorns pivot again and again to find their market, Canva’s proposition today is remarkably similar to that pitch of more than a decade ago. Its easy-to-use, templated design platform allows people to create business cards, birthday invitations, social media ads, sales presentations, coffee mugs, and yearbooks. It works equally well on a phone, tablet, or laptop. Canva is a word processor for our modern visual culture, adjusting anything you see—text, an image, a background, an animation—with a simple tap.
[…]
Canva wants to push exporting options even further, by breaking its users out of the most limited format in design: the PDF. Later this year, Canva will begin allowing users to export projects not just as PDFs, but as single-serve websites with unique URLs. So a wedding invite built in Canva could be instantly published to the web, complete with the ability to accept RSVPs. Canva is reimagining stagnant files as interactive, shareable sites, which Perkins believes will be the predominant way designs are shared well into the future.
Previously:
