Canva

Canva is an Australian visual communication and design software company headquartered in Sydney. Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams founded it in 2013. It makes a browser and mobile design platform used to create social media graphics, presentations, documents, videos, websites and print materials. Melanie Perkins is CEO and Cliff Obrecht is COO.

Canva's products include the core Canva editor, Canva Docs, the Content Planner social scheduler, and Canva for Teams and Enterprise. It also offers AI features grouped as Magic Studio. Through acquisitions Canva has added Flourish for data visualisation and Affinity (Serif), a professional design suite it acquired in March 2024. In February 2021 Canva acquired Kaleido, the Austrian company behind the remove.bg background-removal tool, along with Czech startup Smartmockups. In February 2022 it acquired Flourish, a UK data-visualisation company; at that time Canva reported more than 75 million monthly active users.

Canva works on a freemium model. The free plan suits individuals, and paid Pro, Teams and Enterprise plans unlock premium content, brand kits and admin controls. The company has localised templates for India and works with Indian creators, but we could not confirm the address of a Canva office in India from an official source. Flourish announced on its own blog that it had become part of the Canva family.

Canva is privately held and backed by venture investors. It has not published an official employee figure that we could verify for this profile. Cameron Adams, the third co-founder, joined Perkins and Obrecht before the 2013 launch. Canva counts 1 January 2013 as its official start date.