Canva has grown significantly in recent years, and now banks about $US1.4 billion ($2.1 billion) in yearly revenue, from a global customer base of 125 million.
It was just one of many Australian tech companies caught up in the sudden collapse of SVB, which sparked a crisis of confidence across the global banking system ending in last weekend’s emergency buyout of Credit Suisse by UBS.
“It’s a real tragedy that SVB shut down, they were such a great partner to the ecosystem,” Mr Obrecht said.
“But no bank can survive a bank run, and it’s just incredibly sad to see such a pillar of the tech ecosystem go down like that.”
Despite a gloomy global outlook for fast-growing tech companies, with rising interest rates prompting venture capitalists to tighten their purse strings and triggering industry-wide, staff layoffs, Canva’s growth has continued unabated.
It booked 40 million new customers in the last six months alone and now has 3500 employees across more than 10 countries with plans to keep hiring another thousand this year.
“We’ve got no plans to do layoffs, we don’t need outside capital, we aren’t going to IPO any time soon, I’ll probably be in this job for the rest of my life,” Mr Obrecht said.
On Thursday, Mr Obrecht, co-founder and chief executive Melanie Perkins, and chief product officer Cameron Adams unveiled a suite of generative AI-backed design products that stem from the acquisition of Kaleido.ai, an Austrian visual AI-start-up, in February 2021.
The new tools augment company’s existing Visual Worksuite, launched last September, and range from text-to-image generation, automatic branding kits, and automatic copywriting that users will recognise from Open AI’s popular ChatGPT tool.
“If you’re not embracing AI as part of your general business workflows, like any productivity tool, you’re going to be left for dead,” Mr Obrecht said.
“Just like when mobile was released, and cloud infrastructure was released, there’s this tectonic shift in technology. The commodotisation of AI is underway.”
The new tools draw on the ever-growing library of Canva-user-created content and offers its customers a way to earn money by donating their designs to Canva’s AI systems, to train the algorithms for future projects.
“The idea is to strip out every pain point that prevents an idea going from someone’s head to the piece of paper,” Ms Perkins said.
Adobe and Microsoft rivalry grows
While Canva was launching its new AI-powered design tools to cheers in Sydney on Thursday, its US competitors, Adobe and Microsoft, were also spruiking the power of artificial intelligence for design at other product launch events in the United States.
Adobe rolled out a beta version of a product called Firefly on Wednesday, which is a collection of AI models that will be integrated into Adobe Express, Photoshop and Illustrator.
Microsoft meanwhile introduced a Bing Image Creator preview that adds OpenAI’s DALL-E AI text to image generation software.
Who owns AI designs?
While millions of people worldwide experiment with artificial intelligence, and companies such as Canva, Adobe and Microsoft race to entrench the technology in their products, the legalities about copyright and ownership still hang over the industry.
“The open legal question is, if a machine produces something, is that copywritable?” Mr Adams said in an interview.
“There are probably some updates to legislation needed. We would argue we want to move to a place where creators are rewarded for what they create, and where people have certainty over what they can do with what they get out of an AI.”
Despite some negative coverage related to its falling valuation in the last year, both Ms Perkins and Mr Obrecht remained bullish about Canva’s strength and potential to become one of the world’s biggest companies.
“Profitability went out of fashion for a while in the tech industry, but it’s always been a focus for us,” Ms Perkins said, adding the company had been profitable for the last six years and was on track for profitability in 2023.
Much of Canva’s growth is powered by adoption in the United States and Brazil. The US is its largest market in terms of revenue generation, while Brazil has the most monthly-active users.
