![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/b3a5e27b67bafef557dc9d266c430580bca7aae2.png\")
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April 17, 2026 \u2014 5:00am<\/p>\n
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Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n Save this article for later<\/p>\n Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.<\/p>\n Got it<\/p>\n AAA<\/p>\n Ten years before she became a billionaire, in 2011, a 24-year-old Melanie Perkins built a software prototype called Canvas Chef. The idea was simple: a prompt box where you described what you wanted to design, and it appeared on-screen.<\/p>\n Perkins pitched it to more than 100 investors. They all said no.<\/p>\n Fifteen years later, Canva is Australia\u2019s most successful technology start-up. The company, an online design platform that lets anyone produce professional-looking presentations, social posts and marketing materials, was built by Perkins and her now-husband Cliff Obrecht \u2013 who are today two of Australia\u2019s richest people<\/a>.<\/p>\n Canva has 265 million monthly users, $US4 billion ($5.6 billion) in annual revenue and a market valuation sitting at about $100 billion. This week, at one of the world\u2019s largest football stadiums in Los Angeles, the company unveiled what its co-founders are calling its most significant product launch to date \u2013 Canva AI 2.0.<\/p>\n It is, at its core, exactly what Canvas Chef was supposed to be on a much larger scale. It\u2019s a prompt box where you describe what you want, and it appears.<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe this will be the most significant moment in Canva\u2019s history,\u201d Perkins says. \u201cWe are extraordinarily excited to introduce this to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n The timing is either perfect or catastrophic, depending on who you ask.<\/p>\n Canva AI 2.0 arrives in the middle of what the technology industry has started calling the \u201cSaaSpocalypse\u201d \u2013 a violent repricing of the software companies that defined the past decade. Atlassian\u2019s market capitalisation<\/a> has cratered to $26 billion. Figma, the designer\u2019s darling that listed at $US19.3 billion last July, has shed roughly a third of its value. Google\u2019s AI website builder, Stitch, triggered sell-offs across the sector within hours of its announcement. And even Anthropic\u2019s Cowork product \u2013 a desktop assistant targeted at everyday white-collar workers \u2013 has been cited as a contributor to billions wiped from Australian software stocks.<\/p>\n The world\u2019s tech billionaires, and their investors, are rattled. Canva co-founder Obrecht recently issued and then quickly deleted a post to employees about the velocity at which AI firms were working, saying his staff should match the pace.<\/p>\n Dan Romanoff, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, who covers software companies, says Canva executives have good reason to be spooked. \u201cI think Canva is more susceptible to AI threats than Adobe given its lower-end customer base,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven how valuations have collapsed for both Adobe and Figma, it\u2019s hard to imagine how Canva\u2019s valuation has been sustained.\u201d<\/p>\n Rory O\u2019Driscoll, a veteran software investor at Scale Venture Partners, also sees cause for concern amid the confetti and on-stage raps that have characterised its events at SoFi Stadium.<\/p>\n \u201cThe market will throw out all the babies with the bathwater before picking back up the babies it wants to keep,\u201d he says. \u201cCanva, as a founder-led, innovative company that is profitable and has customer love, can do that. But they have to get it done.\u201d<\/p>\n Inside Canva, Obrecht has been getting it done. He says he\u2019s been preparing for this moment for two years. And now he finally gets to talk about it.<\/p>\n The work wasn\u2019t visible from the outside. No major new features have been launched, and no splashy acquisitions announced until recently<\/a>. The internal slogan was four words: \u201cMore AI, less UI.\u201d The engineering effort involved rebuilding Canva from the ground up \u2013 rewiring every feature in the platform so AI agents could access and trigger them directly, without a human clicking anything.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been a long time wearing baggy clothes in the gym,\u201d Obrecht told this masthead in an interview ahead of Create. \u201cWe\u2019ve been working hard before we get to go to the beach and rip our shirt off.\u201d<\/p>\n Canva has been here before. Between 2016 and 2018, the company undertook a full rewrite of its codebase \u2013 a project employees described at the time as \u201chellish\u201d \u2013 during which it shipped almost nothing new. The result was the foundation that powered Canva\u2019s next six years of growth.<\/p>\n Obrecht sees the current rebuild as the same bet. \u201cWe\u2019ve had to go slow to go fast,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd now we\u2019re back to moving like a go-kart, not like a big cruise liner.\u201d<\/p>\n The product that emerged this week is ambitious, and will determine whether Canva thrives amid the AI turmoil or is lost at sea.<\/p>\n Canva AI 2.0 introduces conversational design (natural language in, finished work out), agentic orchestration (describe a goal and Canva co-ordinates its tools to deliver it), connectors to Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar and others, and what Canva calls \u201cliving memory\u201d \u2013 persistent context that keeps projects on brand without manual input. An orchestration layer built partly on Simtheory, an AI agent management company Canva acquired earlier this month, ties it all together.<\/p>\n Cameron Adams, Canva\u2019s co-founder and chief product officer, says the hardest single piece was the Canva Design Model, a proprietary AI system that understands how design works and can generate and edit layered, editable compositions rather than flat images.<\/p>\n \u201cThat has been well over two years of development,\u201d Adams says. \u201cNothing that you see in Canva AI 2.0 could have been done without it.\u201d<\/p>\n The re-architecture required every person in the company to contribute, and will \u2013 in Obrecht\u2019s words \u2013 flip the company from being a \u201cdesign platform with AI tools\u201d to an \u201cAI platform with design tools\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople don\u2019t wake up in the morning going, \u2018I want to create a social post\u2019,\u201d Obrecht says. \u201cThey wake up saying, \u2018I want to grow my business.\u2019 When the capabilities are available to help them achieve their complete goals, you need to move there.\u201d<\/p>\n But there is a quieter problem that no amount of new features can solve on its own, and it was articulated this year by someone who has no interest in Canva\u2019s failure.<\/p>\n Jason Lemkin, founder of the influential software investor community SaaStr, wrote a piece this month in which he described his own drift away from the product. He\u2019s been a paying customer for more than eight years. He hasn\u2019t opened Canva in months. It happened gradually: thumbnails went to one AI tool, video clipping to another, sales decks to a third. Each replacement was purpose-built and was slightly better than Canva at its narrow task.<\/p>\n \u201cEach of these tools does one thing well really well,\u201d Lemkin wrote. \u201cAnd just like that, my personal Canva usage went to zero. Not because I made a decision to leave. I just stopped going there.\u201d<\/p>\n His team still uses Canva daily. So by every standard metric, they\u2019re a retained customer. But the person who drove the original purchase has disengaged \u2013 and that dynamic, Lemkin argues, is invisible in aggregate growth numbers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe most dangerous time to have a stealth churn problem is when your growth is so strong you\u2019d never think to look for one.\u201d<\/p>\n Obrecht would never frame the launch in these terms. But Canva AI 2.0\u2019s entire architecture \u2013 the workflow ownership, the connectors, the shift from individual features to end-to-end goals \u2013 is basically designed to answer Lemkin\u2019s problem.<\/p>\n Adams also argues that what Canva is launching this week cannot be replicated by the wave of AI coding tools now flooding the market.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s pretty impossible to vibe code Canva,\u201d Adams says. \u201cWhen you think of the lifecycle of that software \u2013 who\u2019s maintaining it, who\u2019s fixing bugs, who\u2019s keeping up \u2013 you end up with 1000 people using that system, and who\u2019s making sure it\u2019s not going to break, that it doesn\u2019t have security holes in it? That is a whole piece of creating software that often gets glossed over.\u201d<\/p>\n The pressing question that sits behind all of this is when Canva will finally be listed on the public stock market. Expected in 2027, it is likely to make instant millionaires of some of its 5500 employees and be the biggest event in recent Australian technology history.<\/p>\n Related Article Canva is trading at roughly 12 to 13 times trailing revenue in secondary markets. Romanoff, at Morningstar, is sceptical. \u201cI doubt there is a tonne of appetite for a design software IPO, especially when many investors are already writing the main player in this space completely off,\u201d he says. He also flags a distinction that will matter to public investors: Canva\u2019s nine consecutive years of profitability are on a free cash flow basis, which is a different and more relaxed threshold than generally accepted accounting principles.<\/p>\n Obrecht confirmed, in what appears to be the first public acknowledgement of the strategy, that the staged rollout of Canva AI 2.0 \u2013 initially to just one million test users \u2013 is explicitly designed to generate data on a new business model before going public.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are moving from charging for features to charging essentially for AI credits,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s really a growth-first margin decision, and given the magnitude of this launch, it\u2019s going to shift that usage significantly. So we\u2019re very much waiting on the data. You want to do that as a private company.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike traditional software, where the marginal cost of serving another user is negligible, AI features carry real compute costs. Canva needs to understand what that price is \u2013 and what users will tolerate \u2013 before Wall Street gets to set expectations.<\/p>\n \u201cI actually would way rather launch in a market that isn\u2019t super-frothy,\u201d Obrecht says, \u201cbecause then you can launch with a valuation that\u2019s fair. A depressed market doesn\u2019t scare us at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Adams says there\u2019s a key difference between Canva and the companies that have seen their valuations fall to pieces.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the SaaSpocalypse is a reflection on companies who really don\u2019t have their AI story figured out,\u201d he says. \u201cFor us, because we\u2019ve been working in it for so many years now, and we\u2019ve laid the proper foundations, we\u2019re paying the dividends for it.\u201d<\/p>\n Rick Baker, a partner at Blackbird Ventures and an early Canva investor, says the AI pivot makes perfect sense.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is Canva stepping up to become one of the major forces in AI globally and sets it up beautifully for the next phase of growth as it heads towards an IPO,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Before an IPO, the real test will be the millions of users and how they react to this week\u2019s announcements.<\/p>\n \u201cCanva is still the king of \u2018good enough, fast enough\u2019 design,\u201d AI analyst Tanveer Ahmad said before this week\u2019s announcements. \u201cIt is \u2018an 80 per cent solution\u2019. It does 80 per cent of what Photoshop does, 80 per cent of what Premiere does, and 80 per cent of what Google Docs does.<\/p>\n \u201cFor most marketers, that\u2019s perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n On the ground in Los Angeles, Obrecht is clearly in his element, doing what he has been doing for more than a decade: talking about the company he and Perkins started from her mother\u2019s living room in Perth, with the energy of someone who cannot quite separate himself from the product.<\/p>\n He and his co-founders are on little sleep, having now rehearsed step-by-step the event that will make or break the company\u2019s future.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s never been funner,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s never been harder.\u201d<\/p>\n Three years ago, Canva was growing its headcount at 50 per cent a year. Last year, it was below 10 per cent. This year, below 5 per cent. Obrecht says it\u2019s this decision that means he can rule out a headline in six months that the company is laying off chunks of its workforce, which has already happened at Atlassian, Block and what will surely be countless more software companies. The efficiency gains are coming from AI tools, not from cutting people, he says. \u201cRather than this gas-on, hit-reverse, lay-off kind of mentality, we\u2019ve seen this coming, and we\u2019ve just eased our foot off the accelerator.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether the market will reward that discipline depends on what happens next. The AI credits will be consumed or they won\u2019t. The workflows will hold or they\u2019ll fragment. <\/p>\n Somewhere, in all of that, Canvas Chef will get its answer.<\/p>\n David Swan travelled to Los Angeles with support from Canva.<\/p>\n The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning<\/a>.<\/p>\n Save<\/p>\n You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n![\"Canva](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776378970_509_6a131d5b13fb17b542990c452eafdb877bff495d.jpeg\")
Canva founders (from left) Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins and Cameron Adams have unveiled a new AI-based product push in LA.<\/p>\n![\"Perkins](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/3bfbe137caf761e8e7d5e3d5fb1156d7b67ee038.jpeg\")
Perkins on stage at SXSW in Sydney.Oscar Colman<\/p>\n![\"Obrecht](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/3a9b57afc06be27f25cc26ba3ede5d2fb0cf7845.jpeg\")
Obrecht leaves lunch at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in Idaho in July 2025.Getty Images<\/p>\n![\"Obrecht](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/04cea8c34bfd5fd25dfe56f1971217a2b454c17f.jpeg\")
Obrecht and Perkins are excited about their new product.<\/p>\n![\"Canva\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/07ee2fafa968003c53d7d5f3783d84de765e3684.jpeg\")
Canva\u2019s new AI features launched this week.<\/p>\n![\"Adams](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/98dee60a8feeb99556fc8d4bc18edbb1cabf62df.jpeg\")
Adams at the launch of the new AI-based product push in LA.<\/p>\n![\"Canva](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1775708351_591_50b867186677ca99715e6a9a83fa5da5e53b4bc9.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Blackbird](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/def3b88b824c9b36d8d96a524f2e0c48641fda24.jpeg\")
Blackbird Ventures co-founder and partner Rick Baker.Dominic Lorrimer<\/p>\n![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1765876452_771_b3a5e27b67bafef557dc9d266c430580bca7aae2.png\")
David Swan<\/a> is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X<\/a> or email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"April 17, 2026 \u2014 5:00am Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611647,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-611646","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611646\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}