Canva's not-so-casual pivot to campaign command

At the start of March 2025, Canva invited 25 community members—students, business owners, creators from different walks of life—to test a series of upcoming tools. The event culminated in an enthusiastic show-and-tell that ranged from interactive quizzes to calculators and portfolio showcases.

“We are extraordinarily excited about the potential that this will have when we give this to 230 million people and see their creativity put to great use,” said Melanie Perkins, Canva co-founder and CEO, at a virtual preview ahead of Canva Create 2025—a one-day product launch event held on April 10 in Los Angeles.

That excitement is understandable. With 230 million monthly users (up from 180 million a year ago), the Australia-based graphic design platform has hit a new scale. “Our revenue has also grown; we are now at over $3 billion in annualised revenue,” added co-founder Cliff Obrecht.

Since introducing its Visual Suite in 2022, Canva has added over 145 million users to its platform globally. In March 2025, users collectively produced one billion designs—averaging over 420 designs per second. Since its inception in 2013, the platform has seen a cumulative total of 34 billion designs created.

These aren't hobbyist projects. Over 95% of Fortune 500 companies, including T-Mobile, Salesforce, and FedEx, use Canva at some level. This proves that the platform is not a design sidekick anymore—it’s a full-stack creative ecosystem.

At Canva Create, companies like Docusign showcased how they use Canva to create engaging, on-brand content at scale. Docusign used Canva to scale their global rebrand, rebranding thousands of assets and saving over 500 hours of creative team time.

At the heart of Canva Create 2025 is the company's largest-ever product drop. From integrating generative AI into creative workflows to enabling code-powered interactivity for non-engineers, the company is pitching itself as the go-to platform not just for creating assets but for executing full campaigns—across functions and file types.

One of the headline launches is Visual Suite 2.0, a unified design space that eliminates the fragmentation between files, formats, and functions. “Before Canva, to design something, one required different software for a website, a print product, a video, a presentation or whiteboard… you'd have to learn new shortcuts, new paradigms, new ways to work with the files,” explained Perkins. “At Canva Create, we are taking this to the next level… a marketing campaign can now be in one design—your brief, brainstorm, budget and pitch… can literally be on the same page.”

AI, but with guardrails

Agencies constantly switch between platforms to execute campaigns, which often leads to scattered workflows and lost time. A unified environment that supports live collaboration—while also managing brand assets and ensuring consistency—can be a game changer. With everything in one place, teams spend less time chasing files or fixing format issues, and more time actually creating.

This is where Canva is leaning deeply on integrating AI into its platform. This move isn’t about novelty; it’s about scale and systemisation.

The new ‘Canva AI’ interface is conversational, built to help users start and complete a design in one flow. “We are introducing Canva AI; a massive workflow upgrade… a fully collaborative platform that your team can work on and bring their projects together,” said co-founder Cameron Adams.

More critically for marketers, all AI-generated content on Canva will carry an embedded watermark in accordance with emerging industry metadata standards. “It's very important to maintain transparency on things generated through AI,” Adams added. That’s a necessary checkbox in an industry now governed by brand safety, copyright scrutiny and ethical AI expectations.

Another AI-centric rollout is ‘Magic Studio at Scale’, which has been designed to help marketers repurpose, translate, resize and personalise content across platforms in just a few clicks. “Those in marketing or sales need to create more content than ever before,” Perkins noted. “You can translate content and copy… resize content at scale rather than one by one to create entire campaigns.”

The tool’s goal is to take what would normally be a labour-intensive content adaptation process and automate it. And it claims to do this without compromising brand consistency.

Sheets, but making them visual

One of the most surprising unveilings was ‘Canva Sheets’—a direct play into the spreadsheet ecosystem, but built with visual storytelling at its core. “We know that there has been one key missing piece—data,” Adams said. “Data is at the core of [marketing] and enables you to tell proper stories about your business and your goals.”

Unlike traditional spreadsheets, Canva Sheets allow users to drop in images and designs, connect live data from platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics and even the World Bank, and visualise the data using integrated tools from Flourish (acquired in 2022). Sheets also come with AI-powered ‘Magic Insights’ and ‘Magic Formulas’, simplifying data manipulation and interpretation.

This makes Sheets less of a functional add-on and more of a creative tool that brand teams can use to plan, present, and iterate on campaigns without ever leaving the Canva ecosystem. It's Excel for the visually inclined—and for marketers who want speed without needing a data analyst on standby.

Code without the coding

For creative professionals who have shied away from code, Canva’s has launched a new feature to add yet another dimension. “Many people find coding extraordinarily complex and intimidating,” said Perkins. “But coding unlocks some incredible superpowers like interactivity, automation and connectivity.” Panther coon allows users to type in a natural prompt—say, “interactive travel map”—and watch it get auto-coded into a functional widget that’s immediately editable within the Canva editor.

This drag-and-prompt approach to code generation borrows from Canva’s own product prototyping process. “Having a prototype for every feature that we're planning on launching is really important to ensure that what we're launching is the best thing for our customers,” Adams added. For agencies working on pitch decks, UX mocks or live portfolio experiences, this could drastically cut down prototyping time.

Canva isn’t just banking on new features—it’s also commissioning research to underline the urgency for better creative output. A study by MMA Global in partnership with Canva found that 77% of senior marketers believe it’s never been more critical than now to invest in creative output. This is a telling stat in an era where programmatic reach is commoditised, and campaign success is increasingly tied to standout storytelling.

“The ability to prototype really quickly means we can shorten the time it takes to get great product out to customers,” Adams said. In an agency context, that translates to faster feedback loops, faster creative iteration, and faster time-to-campaign.

Global ambitions, local focus

As Canva matures, so does its international ambition. “We’ve even signed up full country education systems in countries like Turkey and Indonesia. Japan is our fastest growing market, followed by Germany,” said Obrecht. Canva now maintains a scoreboard that tracks progress toward a bold target: one billion monthly active users globally—roughly one in every five internet users.

India, with its fast-growing marketing and digital content economy, could play a key role in Canva's next phase of growth. Its tools are well-suited for the frugal innovation style many Indian marketers excel at—especially when there's a need to execute personalised, multi-platform content at speed and at scale.

Canva’s new launches are not just shiny add-ons. They signal a strategic pivot for the company—from being a friendly design tool to becoming the control centre for campaign creation and content deployment.

For creative agencies, the implications are immediate. With these tools, Canva assure them that it can consolidate campaign workflows and shorten time-to-market. And they can do this while riding the AI wave, safely and systematically.

Given that creative professionals are more clued into data storytelling, these features are now visual-first. Moreover, Canva claims that with Visual Suite 2.0, prototypes and pitches can be built with minimal dev support.

And for brand marketers, especially those in charge of content localisation, channel diversification, or internal comms? Canva is effectively offering a marketing command centre—where briefs, visuals, reports, assets, and even interactivity sit in one interface.

“We’re just getting started,” said Obrecht. Judging by the scale of launches this year, Canva is no longer just chasing design democratisation. It’s chasing the full creative stack.