India is one of the fastest growing markets for the global graphic and design company Canva and the company will continue investing heavily in this region, co-founder and COO Clifford Obrecht said, adding that the country also has one of the largest creator communities on Facebook.
His comments come at a time when India is gaining prominence as a key market for all social media giants globally given that the country has one of the largest user base volumes for apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. Social media companies are also eyeing India strategically to start monetising several of their products.
Obrecht was speaking at the launch of Canva’s end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI) enabled offerings under ‘Magic Studio’.
In fact, Canva’s newest features under Magic Studio including Magic Media, Magic Expand, Magic Grab, Magic Morph, and Magic Edit will be available in 11 Indian languages such as Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, and Telugu.
Addressing media questions, Obrecht said, “India as a market is very valuable and important, and we are investing very heavily into it. One of the top sectors using Canva in India is education. So university students and students in primary schools, etc. The two largest document types and categories in the country are presentations and social media. And then India also is our third largest creator community as well.”
A Canva spokesperson later told Moneycontrol that the company has doubled its users in India in the past one year alone.
“Education is one of our most popular use cases, with nearly 2 in 10 sign-ups being students. Presentations and social media designs are also the most popular product categories in the market,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added, “India is also home to our third largest community group, India's Canva for Freelancers with over 230,000 members.”
Strategic partnerships in India
Canva is already involved in significant partnerships and initiatives locally like the Canva for Startups program where they have partnered with large-scale incubators and accelerators like Headstart, Razorpay, and Instamojo, to offer their startup community with free trials to Canva. This program has reached over 1,000 startups and SMBs to date.
“Canva has also been partnering with prominent tertiary education institutes in India such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) to offer support and mentorship to their students through competitions, as well as their in-house entrepreneurship cells that promote student-led ventures,” the spokesperson said.
The company additionally works with education-focused organisations such as the Centre for Teacher Accreditation, Vedantu, and the various state and central Education Departments as well as leading school networks to provide teacher training and mentorship support, enabling them to incorporate visual learning in their classrooms.
Canva completes a decade
Started in 2013, and last valued at $40 billion in 2021, its valuation was later marked down to $25.6 billion in 2023. This year the Australian design company completed a decade into its journey.
Speaking to the media, co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins shared that the company surpassed $1.7 billion in annualized revenue and serves 16 million paying subscribers with more than 150 million monthly active users, after adding 65 million users in the last year alone. Over 1 billion presentations have been created using the platform so far.
The company has been profitable for the past six years and expects to do the same as it enters its seventh year.
While launching Canva’s all-in-one comprehensive AI design platform, Magic Studio, she shared that the early set of its AI-powered design products has been used more than 3 billion times.
Launching Magic Studio
Magic Studio is a major product update from the company, which will mark its next phase of growth as design thinking and generative AI took over the world in 2023.
The AI design platform will offer a suite of AI tools built on proprietary models, in partnership with industry leaders, and the app ecosystem. The offering will be comprehensive and interoperable. Targeted at individual, teams and organisations, Magic Studio will also will also let users access the Canva Apps Marketplace which will AI-enabled design and productivity tools in one place including Dall-E, Imagen by Google, MurfAI, Soundraw to name a few.
Some interesting automated features with Magic Studio include : Magic Switch which lets convert any design or ideas into range of content formats in one click. Brand Voice which is a copywriting assistant and Magic Design that can turn a prompt or your own media into captivating and fully designed videos, presentations.
Perkins said, “With a focus on making complex things simple, Magic Studio has been built for the 99 percent of the world without complex design training. This launch marks the start of an exciting new chapter as we double down on empowering over 150 million individuals and thousands of businesses to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals.”
$200-million AI fund
Canva also announced a $200-million fund to shell out content and AI royalties to be paid to the company’s creator community over the next three years.
“The Creator Compensation Program will pay Canva Creators who consent to having their content used to train the company’s proprietary AI models,” the company shared.
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