Canva: The Australian Success Story Now Leading the AI Design Revolution

There are not many technology companies that can claim to have been founded in Australia, stayed in Australia, and grown into a global platform used by hundreds of millions of people. Canva is one of them — and in 2025 and 2026, it has added another chapter to its story by increasingly positioning itself as one of the world's most ambitious AI-powered creative platforms.

This is the story of how a design tool built in Perth became a global technology powerhouse, and why its AI push matters for Australia and for anyone who creates visual content.

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Where Canva Came From

Canva was founded in 2012 by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adams. Perkins and Obrecht were based in Perth, Western Australia, where Perkins had been running a school yearbook design business called Fusion Books while studying at the University of Western Australia. The insight behind Canva was straightforward: professional design tools like Adobe Photoshop and InDesign were powerful but difficult to learn, and most people who needed to create visual content — presentations, social media graphics, marketing materials — did not have the time or training to use them.

Canva's proposition was to make design accessible to everyone. A drag-and-drop interface, a library of templates, and a clean browser-based experience — but executing it well took years of work and a great deal of persistence.

Perkins and Obrecht famously struggled to raise early funding. Perkins has spoken publicly about pitching to more than 100 investors before securing backing. The early fundraising journey included a trip to a Silicon Valley kite-surfing event to meet Bill Tai, a venture capitalist who became an early supporter and introduced the founders to other investors. The story has become part of Australian startup folklore — a reminder that some of the most successful companies are built through persistence rather than overnight success.

Canva launched publicly in 2013 and grew quickly.

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The Scale of What Canva Has Built

Canva's about page currently lists more than 220 million monthly active users across more than 190 countries, with more than 30 billion designs created on the platform. It offers an extensive library of templates spanning presentations, social media graphics, documents, videos, websites, and print materials, alongside hundreds of millions of photos, illustrations, icons, and other design elements.

Canva reported 3.5 billion dollars in revenue for 2025, according to the company, reinforcing its position as one of Australia's largest software businesses. Because Canva remains a private company, its financial reporting is not independently audited in the way a publicly listed company's would be, but the figure represents a significant milestone for an Australian-founded technology business.

The company employs several thousand people globally, with its headquarters in Sydney (the team relocated from Perth to Sydney as it scaled). It has offices in Austin, Beijing, London, Manila, and São Paulo, among other locations. Despite its global footprint, Canva has maintained a strong Australian identity and its founding team remains in leadership roles — Melanie Perkins as CEO, Cliff Obrecht as COO, and Cameron Adams as Chief Product Officer. Canva has also announced a new Sydney campus scheduled to open in 2027, signalling continued investment in its Australian base.

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Canva's AI Transformation

The most significant development in Canva's recent history is its deep integration of artificial intelligence into its product. This transformation has been building for several years but accelerated dramatically from 2023 onward, and has continued to expand in scope through 2025 and 2026.

Magic Studio: Where It Began

In late 2023, Canva launched Magic Studio — a collection of AI tools integrated directly into the Canva editor. Magic Studio brought together several AI capabilities that had previously been separate features and made them accessible from a single panel within the design interface.

The core tools in Magic Studio include:

Magic Write — an AI text generation tool that can draft copy for presentations, social media posts, marketing materials, and other design elements. Users provide a brief description of what they want to say, and Magic Write generates text that can be edited and refined.

Magic Design — a tool that generates complete design layouts from a text prompt or an uploaded image. A user can describe what they want — a presentation on sustainable agriculture, a social media post for a coffee shop, a flyer for a community event — and Magic Design produces a set of template options that match the description.

Magic Edit — an AI image editing tool that allows users to modify images by describing the change they want to make. A user can select a region of an image and type a description of what they want to add or change, and the AI generates a modified version.

Magic Eraser — a tool that removes unwanted elements from images using AI. Users paint over the area they want to remove, and the AI fills in the background.

Magic Expand — a tool that extends the edges of an image beyond its original boundaries using AI-generated content, useful for adapting images to different aspect ratios.

Magic Animate — a tool that automatically applies animations to design elements, creating animated presentations and social media content without requiring manual animation work.

By the time Canva acquired Leonardo.Ai in July 2024, Magic Studio had already been used more than 7 billion times — a figure that would grow substantially through 2025.

The Affinity Acquisition

In March 2024, Canva acquired Affinity, the UK-based developer of professional design software. The Affinity suite — covering photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout — is widely used by professional designers as an alternative to Adobe's Creative Cloud, and the acquisition gave Canva access to a professional-grade design toolset alongside its existing consumer and business-focused platform.

The Affinity acquisition was significant for several reasons. It signalled Canva's ambition to serve professional designers, not just the broader market of non-designers who make up its core user base. The Affinity team of 90 people joined Canva, bringing deep expertise in desktop-grade creative software.

In 2025, Canva subsequently launched the all-new Affinity — a reimagined, unified application combining vector design, photo editing, and page layout in a single tool — and made it completely free for individuals. Users on Canva premium plans can also unlock Canva's AI tools directly within Affinity. The move was welcomed by the design community and significantly expanded the reach of the Affinity tools beyond their original paid user base.

The Leonardo.Ai Acquisition

In July 2024, Canva made another strategically important acquisition: Leonardo.Ai, the Australian generative AI company. The acquisition brought Leonardo's team of 120 researchers, engineers, and designers into Canva, along with its Phoenix foundational model — a leading image generation model capable of producing hyper-realistic photos, character portraits, illustrations, and more.

The Leonardo.Ai acquisition is central to understanding where Canva's AI strategy has moved. Rather than relying primarily on third-party AI models, Canva is now pursuing a hybrid approach: developing proprietary AI technology through Leonardo, integrating external foundation model partnerships, and combining these with Canva's own design intelligence and content library.

Leonardo.Ai continues to operate its own platform independently, now with the backing of Canva's resources and access to licensed content from Canva's creator program.

Canva's AI Infrastructure: A Hybrid Strategy

Canva's current AI stack reflects this hybrid approach. The company combines its own models and Leonardo.Ai's Phoenix model with partnerships with leading AI providers including OpenAI and Anthropic, alongside Canva's extensive design and content library. This is a considerably more sophisticated position than simply building on top of foundation models — Canva is investing in its own AI research and development while maintaining external partnerships where they add value.

Canva has also implemented AI safety and responsible AI practices, publishing guidelines for the use of AI-generated content on its platform and implementing safeguards to prevent the generation of harmful or misleading content.

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From Magic Studio to Canva AI 2.0: The Evolution

Canva's AI journey from 2023 to 2026 represents a fundamental shift in what the company is building — from a design editor with AI features to something closer to an AI-native creative platform.

2023: Magic Studio — Canva's first integrated AI suite, bringing together image generation, text generation, design generation, and editing tools under a single interface.

2024: Expanded capabilities and strategic acquisitions — The Affinity and Leonardo.Ai acquisitions strengthened Canva's position with professional designers and gave it proprietary AI technology. AI features expanded across the platform.

2025: Canva AI and the Creative Operating System — Canva introduced a broader Creative Operating System and launched Canva AI, described by the company as an all-in-one creative partner capable of generating designs, documents, images, and interactive experiences. New tools included Canva Code, Canva Sheets, expanded AI workflows, and AI-powered content generation at scale. By this point, Magic Studio products had been used more than 16 billion times.

2026: Canva AI 2.0 and the Canva Design Model — Canva's most significant product evolution since the company's launch, according to the company itself. Canva AI 2.0 moves toward a conversational, agentic creative platform. It introduces the Canva Design Model — designed to understand design structure, hierarchy, and brand logic — which can generate fully layered, editable designs from a prompt. Additional capabilities include persistent memory, agentic editing, connectors, scheduling, web research, brand intelligence, Sheets AI, and Canva Code 2.0. Canva Code 2.0 became available to all users in July 2026. Canva has also expanded design creation into Google Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, bringing design directly into AI workflows.

The arc from Magic Studio to Canva AI 2.0 is the story of a company that started by adding AI buttons to a design editor and has progressively moved toward building an AI-native creative operating system.

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What Canva Means for Australia

Canva's success is significant for Australia in ways that go beyond the company's own financial performance.

Proof of concept for Australian tech. Canva demonstrates that it is possible to build a globally significant technology company from Australia without relocating to Silicon Valley. This matters for the broader Australian technology ecosystem, because it shows that the talent, the capital, and the market access needed to build at scale are achievable from here. Canva is now a genuinely multinational company with major operations around the world, but Sydney remains central to its identity and its leadership.

Talent and investment. Canva's growth has created thousands of technology jobs in Australia and has attracted significant international investment into the Australian technology sector. The Leonardo.Ai acquisition is also a reminder that Australia has produced world-class AI research talent — the kind that a company like Canva would acquire to build its own foundational models.

Inspiration for the next generation. Melanie Perkins has become one of the most prominent technology entrepreneurs in Australia and one of the most visible female founders in the global technology industry. Her story — from a university student running a yearbook business in Perth to the CEO of a company reporting 3.5 billion dollars in annual revenue — is a genuinely inspiring one, and it has had a measurable effect on the ambitions of young Australians interested in technology and entrepreneurship.

Economic contribution. Canva's Australian operations contribute directly to the economy through employment, tax revenue, and the spending of its employees. The company's global revenue also represents an export of Australian-developed intellectual property — one of the most valuable forms of export in a knowledge economy.

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The Road Ahead

Canva remains one of Australia's most prominent potential technology IPO candidates, although the company has not announced a definitive listing timetable. Recent reporting has placed Canva's valuation at around 42 billion US dollars following a staff share sale. A listing on the Australian Securities Exchange or a US exchange would represent one of the largest technology IPOs in Australian history — but that remains a possibility rather than a confirmed plan.

In the meantime, Canva continues to invest in its AI capabilities, its product breadth, and its global user base. The company's strategy is to make Canva the default creative platform for individuals, small businesses, and large organisations alike — a platform where AI assistance makes professional-quality design accessible to anyone, regardless of their design background.

The evolution from Magic Studio to Canva AI 2.0 represents a significant step toward that vision. For Australia, it is a source of genuine pride: a company founded in Perth, built by Australians, and still headquartered in Sydney is now one of the most innovative AI-powered creative platforms in the world. That is a remarkable achievement — and the story is far from over.