Design software company Canva unveils AI tools to take on rivals like Adobe

Australian design software company Canva Inc unveiled a suite of artificial intelligence-powered tools to take on competitors including Adobe Inc.

One of its key distinctions is the ability to instantly convert designs from one format to another with a click, the company said. Users can, for instance, turn a presentation into a summary or create a blog post from notes jotted down during brainstorming, translating into various languages in the process. Canva’s tools can also turn text into photos and create videos from an image or text using Gen-2, a video-generation model by Runway AI Inc.

“We have more than 10 new AI products that fill significant gaps in the workflows of our community around the world,” Chief Executive Officer Melanie Perkins said in an interview. Canva’s users have grown 20% since March to 150 million, with 16 million subscribers.

The new suite, dubbed Magic Studio, marks the latest in a series of product launches in the past year, including enterprise-focused tools in September 2022 and AI software in March.

Canva, which was founded about a decade ago, competes with Adobe, the longtime leader in creative software for graphic arts professionals. Founded four decades ago, Adobe has added generative AI features throughout its products. Its market capitalisation has swelled 50% this year to US$231bil (RM1 trillion).

Investors have long viewed Canva as a candidate to go public, though the company hasn’t discussed plans for doing so. Valued at about US$26bil (RM122.81bil) earlier this year, Canva has focused on making easy-to-use products targeted at people without professional design skills to fuel growth.

The startup surpassed US$1.7bil (RM8bil) in annualised revenue and has added 65 million users in the past year, helped by new AI features. – Bloomberg