Yesterday, Canva announced the latest features of its Worksuite. However, the press was given a preview of the information the day before. This included an explainer from Canva Founder, Melanie Perkins, on how well the company was doing.
When the Canva founders are lined up in a small, intimate audience they’re not in big-stage, rock-concert mode (or reading from scripts). We’ve left this video section completely unedited so you can see Melanie, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams chilling while waiting. Fenot Teckle is the Global Head of Communications and she’s introducing them. A full transcript is below.
Fenot Teckle
Okay. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for being here today. We’re so excited to host you here in Canva. I know many of you were with us last September for our very first Canva Create where we got to see so many of. You experience Canva in real life. And so welcome from us again you the first time in human history you’re going to get to see this what we’ll be showing on stage tomorrow.
Lots of great work happening with the team to enable and empower community and consumers and large organisations so you’ll have a sneak peak of all of that and quick housekeeping point that I would make is that nothing that you see today actually goes live until what time tomorrow? Yes, four o’clock Sydney time. So let’s not break the embargo and thank you for honoring it. In a few minutes You’re going to hear from our founders Melanie Perkins Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams. and all that we’re going to show tomorrow But, if you have any questions in the if you have any questions afterwards, you can find me and my awesome communications team in the back. And we’re here to answer any questions give you any assets, any information that you need, no question will go answered. So thank you for taking the time. I will pass on my co-workers and Mel.
Melanie Perkins
Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. Lots of familiar faces in the room. So, this is our second ever Canva Create which is pretty exciting. It was only six months ago, we had our last one. So, we thought we’d do it again. So, thank you so much for coming. I’m very excited to be with you all.
We have, I heard, it was 1.5 million people now joining us tomorrow. So, quite a few people are going to be tuning in from all across the globe which is extraordinarily exciting. We’re going to be having… that’s actually one million more than last event. So, quite a few eyeballs on us.
We are not here to talk about our roadmap, everything that you see is going to be going live to 125 million people tomorrow. We’re extraordinarily excited to get all this magic out into our customers’ hands.
On the agenda today we’re going to be talking about where we’re at. Cliff’s going to give you a brief overview of Canva and the Visual Suite and then we’re going to talk about our latest products. lots of spoilers here! We’re running through all the things all the magic we’ll be launching tomorrow… infusing magic throughout the Visual Suite, making Canva the home for every brand, especially large Organizations that have lots of brands and complex inner stylesheets.
[We’ll be] talking about some highly requested community features [that] Canva will be getting and some very exciting features that we’re going to be launching. And then we’ll have some time for QandA at the end. And then we’re off home.
Firstly, where are we at? We launched a decade ago, but it’s going to be a birthday coming up later on this year. And what is extraordinarily exciting to see is that growth is actually accelerating since our last Canva Create. We actually have had 40 million people join us as monthly active users, which is pretty exciting to see.
We now have 125 million people returning each month, actually this is going to be 125 million tomorrow, which is pretty cool.
It took us nearly five years to reach our first 10 million users and it we added our last 10 million in just the last 30 days.
So, you really see that acceleration in growth. Of course, we’ve had 13 million paid users, 6 million paid seats in teams, which is more than doubled in the last year from some really well-known brands. Guys, all prominent brands seem to have some kind of uses nowadays. And it’s been really exciting to see the way we’ve been organically moving to large organisations.
For example, with Zoom, using Canva to manage their brand and marketing at scale, Reddit and Greystar the American Cancer Society, SalesForce and the Philadelphia Eagles. Canva is really been used by a very large range of customers across the globe. We now have more than $1.4 billion annualised revenue and very importantly, in this climate, made profitable.
Profitability has been out of fashion I think in the tech industry for a while. We’re very much profitable, We’ve been doing this for a while. This is our sixth year of profitability with last year and we’re on track again this year for profitability.
We have been investing in some of our broad categories for a large number of years now. For example, presentations hes been something we’ve been investing in many years to enable you to design a presentation with ease and then be able to publish it in all sorts of manners from collaborations presenting online or sharing a link or as a talking presentation.
And, I’m very pleased to say that we’ve now had 1 billion presentations created in Canva, which is an incredibly exciting milestone.
And I think with all the people visiting who may have been driving generational change. In some place on social media, I thought this one was quite funny: you can tell which generations people are from when they share screen… There it is. Boomers/GenX: Microsoft PowerPoint. GenY: Google Slides. Gen Z: Canva. Wasn’t me who said it.
We recently reached another exciting milestone of 15 Billion designs and there’s going to be a lot of spoilers here, but that one just jumped right out. 30 million teachers and students are now using Canva for digital and design literacy which is extraordinarily important to our mission: being able to ensure that everyone across the world has access to these high quality tools and it’s regardless people’s ability to afford them. So every school across the globe can access it.
And we’ve been rolling out into some really exciting districts. So, for example, the LA school districts, the Department of Indonesia and this is operating in Mexico as well, which is extraordinarily exciting.
We now are used by 350,000 nonprofits across the globe who are using a non-profit program, which is where you might come across Canva for free which is extraordinarily exciting as well.
So, that’s kind of where we’re at. In a nutshell, it’s going really well. And, I think we’re fortunate to be in a uniquely strong position. There’s a lot of choppy seas out there at the moment, as I’m sure you all very well aware. So, being profitable with strong cash balance meaning we don’t need to raise funds. And, that people are certainly turning to Canva in times of economic uncertainty is getting very, very helpful. So, without further ado, I’m going to pass over to Cliff.
