In an effort to define the leap that Canva AI 2.0 represents, co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins takes us down memory lane. The year is 2011, to be exact, and it’s called Canvas Chef. An early prototype of artificial intelligence (AI), essentially in the form of a simple prompt box for designing a brochure or phonebook. “We like to make complicated things simple and, like a decade ago, we think there’s always a better way,” she tells us. As a creative platform that now has ambitions to evolve into a full productivity suite, a dual approach that adds new features within an architectural layer and intelligent workflows underpins the strategy.
The Canva AI 2.0 update, which intends to fill the void between generation and execution, adds interactive design capabilities, iterative agentic editing within an existing design or visual element, memory-based functionality, as well as layered object intelligence for precision elements. Canva is also introducing Code 2.0 which builds on the success of the initial Canva Code generation from a year ago. There are also new connectors with a number of web apps and services, including Google’s Gmail, Drive and Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook, Notion, Slack, Zoom, and HubSpot. Also a web research module.
The company says a research preview of Canva AI 2.0 is being released now, and will be progressively expanded to more users in the coming weeks.
Canva is particularly confident about agentic orchestration, which Perkins says will make the platform a “true creative partner” and “with the tools to turn ideas into finished results.” A single prompt can not only be used to generate multiple elements or types of content, but can also help with subsequent changes. It understands user intent, helps choose the right tools, and leverages them to create the content the user asks for.
It also ties in with the Memory Library, this should be particularly relevant to the workflows of enterprise customers and teams, where Canva AI models learn from the designs created and can reference a certain set of styles and preferences. This is called living memory, personalization will be an ongoing process.
Perkins explains, “The AI can learn from you and your designs and adapt to your style and preferences. It will get smarter and more useful every time you use it. You can personalize based on all your existing cues, and build your own memory library over time.” This new infrastructure layer works across the entire visual suite, including presentations, documents, social posts, and other content.
Connectors will be useful not only for business and team users, but also for individuals, as it adds the option to collect references from other apps, which can be connected to Canva. For example, if linked to Google Calendar, it can be used to call up details of an upcoming scheduled meeting and create a presentation based on the agenda points.
“Today, most people’s work context is scattered across dozens of different apps. With connectors, everything is in one place,” says Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of Canva.
Last month, Canva introduced Magic Layers as a public beta, which transformed static images, including those generated by AI tools, into fully editable and layered designs. Adams says that in just a few weeks, Magic Layer has been used 9 million times by customers. This is related to the Canva Code 2.0 update. Its initial compatibility was limited to .png and .jpg file formats, support for HTML files comes with the new update.
“You can make interactive designs even more powerful by adding a form to collect data that flows directly into the data layer of Canva Sheets,” explains Adams.
A reference to speed and relevance
The announcements at the company’s Canva Create keynote come on the back of strong momentum that now sees Canva with more than 265 million monthly active users, of which more than 31 million are paid customers (that number is up from 24 million, at this time last year), a reported $4 billion in annual revenue and more than $500 million of that pie coming from the growing B2B business.
“We are the third-most used AI product in the world by user volume according to A16Z, and when it comes to how much customers are spending on AI tools, Canva is seeing the fastest growth of any major software company. Our AI products have been used more than 27 billion times,” says Cliff Obrecht, Canva co-founder and COO.
US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) says Canva is behind only OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in the global AI usage hierarchy, and ahead of DeepSeek, Grok and Cloud. Data from a16z and market research and analytics firm Ypitdata shows that Canva leads Repli (78%), Vercel (72%), HubSpot (63%), Box (60%) and Figma (47%) globally in terms of customer spend, up 101% year over year.
Obrecht described Canva’s transition as “from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools.” This also means that the platform is now competing with a wider range of tech companies and platforms in the process, not just tools that find relevance with design and creative workflows. The Creative OS direction announced late last year was a big step forward.
Fragmented competition? Design template platforms including Vecta and Free Vector, font sources like Font Space and FontFreak, stock photography libraries including Shutterstock and Getty Images, design programs including the Microsoft 365 suite as well as editing software including Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Seashore, publishing services like Shutterfly and FedEx Office, and content management platforms including Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft OneDrive, Gmail as well as Box.
Perkins says, “In the first decade of Canva’s existence, we took an entire fragmented ecosystem and brought it together on one platform and made it accessible to the world. And we’re doing the same thing again.” “Today the manufacturing process is fragmented across many different tools, workflows and it is becoming more disparate. We see this as a huge opportunity to bring them all together on one platform and make it accessible to the world again.”
