AAA<\/p>\n
More than 200 million people use Canva without paying a cent, making birthday invitations and school posters and the slides for Monday\u2019s meeting on a Sydney-built website that turned design software into something anyone can use.<\/p>\n
For a decade, those free users were the company\u2019s greatest asset, a marketing machine that cost almost nothing to run. Artificial intelligence has turned them into a bill, and that bill has upended the most valuable private company Australia has ever built.<\/p>\n
Every request they make now runs on computers someone has to pay for. This month, in large part because of it, Canva cut $10 billion from its own valuation.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cHistorically, the cost to create a design cost us essentially nothing,\u201d co-founder Cliff Obrecht told Stripe\u2019s John Collison on a Sydney stage on August 19. \u201cThe cost of goods to serve a user has gone from cents per month to many, many more cents.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem runs wider than three founders in Sydney. Canva is the most valuable private company Australia has built. About 5500 people work there, most holding shares, and Australian venture funds, wealthy investors and superannuation money sit on its register awaiting a float. What happens next decides whether the biggest success story in Australian technology banks its winnings or becomes a cautionary tale about a company that had its moment and let it pass.<\/p>\n This is becoming a national test too: Canva is among the closest things Australia has to a technology champion, better capitalised and further into AI than almost anything else here. If it cannot make the economics work with 265 million users and $US1.5 billion in the bank, the odds facing every other Australian company trying the same thing are worse.<\/p>\n Software firms typically keep 80 to 90 cents of every dollar because, once the product exists, the next customer costs almost nothing. AI has effectively broken that maths. At Canva\u2019s scale, Obrecht said, paying users now have to subsidise the free ones.<\/p>\n So the company slowed its biggest ever launch to protect profits, cut its revenue growth forecast from 30 to 20 per cent, and has since cut the cost of running AI by about 90 per cent. \u201cWe knew this transition would mean balancing our near-term growth with investing in the enormous opportunity ahead, and we\u2019ve always been willing to make those long-term decisions,\u201d chief executive Melanie Perkins told this masthead.<\/p>\n Still, the valuations started falling.<\/p>\n This month two of Canva\u2019s biggest Australian backers, venture capital firms Blackbird and Airtree, cut the value of their stakes by 17 per cent, to $US34.9 billion. An independent valuer set the price of shares handed to staff at $US31 billion, down from $US38.9 billion a year ago. Share broker Hiive has been quoting stock at a price valuing the company at $US30 billion, nearly 30 per cent below the last official figure.<\/p>\n Related Article Canva says that that internal price is a conservative tax calculation, not a real sale price, and that listed rivals have fallen much further: Adobe is down about 23 per cent over the past year, HubSpot 45 and Figma 68. It\u2019s an argument that cuts both ways, however. If the comparables are what set the price, a strict reading of them would have marked Canva down further than the 17 to 20 per cent, not less.<\/p>\n In September 2021, Canva raised money at $US40 billion<\/a>. Five years on, it\u2019s looking possible that that was its apex.<\/p>\n The open door<\/p>\n The origin story<\/a> is a great one, told countless times now in keynote speeches and in magazine cover stories. Melanie Perkins was tutoring students in Perth, watching them struggle with Photoshop, when she and her future husband Obrecht borrowed $50,000 to build a school yearbook tool out of her mother\u2019s living room. More than 100 investors turned them down. Then it worked, faster than anything in Australian corporate history: $US165 million in 2015, $US6 billion by 2020.<\/p>\n By September 2021 it was $US40 billion, with everything a company needs to float. Fast growth, profits, a product in millions of homes, and a founding story that tugged at the heartstrings. It had a local template, too, in Atlassian, which listed on New York\u2019s Nasdaq in 2015.<\/p>\n Canva did not go. It ran private share sales instead, in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, letting staff and early backers cash out without the company facing a daily share price. No decision has been made on another this year. A float once expected in 2027 has reportedly been shelved, and Canva has not committed to firm timing, saying it will list when it makes sense and that with more than $US1.5 billion in the bank it is in no rush.<\/p>\n A float is not just a payday, it recycles money. Early backers hand capital back to the funds and super members who gave it to them, and those investors put it into the next generation of companies. Staff who cash out become the angel investors and founders of the ones after that. Atlassian\u2019s 2015 listing seeded a decade of Australian start-ups that way.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s rise has been remarkable, and its investors are careful not to sound like they are second-guessing people who built something extraordinary. As US venture capitalist Rory O\u2019Driscoll put it on the 20VC podcast this month<\/a>, asking whether Canva should have floated earlier is really asking whether the early investors should have got out while the founders stayed.<\/p>\n There is self-interest in the deference. Venture funds exist to pass on returns to their investors, everyone in the industry knows it, and wanting your money back after 12 years is not disloyalty. But Canva decides who gets into its next round, and no fund wants to be the one that annoyed the founders.<\/p>\n Perkins and Obrecht have pledged away most of their fortune and are not going anywhere.<\/p>\n The wait is weighing on Canva\u2019s backers, too. Airtree raised its first $60 million fund in 2014 and still has not wound it up. Last week it asked investors to extend that fund again, to July 2028, hoping that Canva floats or offers an exit before then, news site Rampart reported. Co-founder Daniel Petre, who no longer runs the firm day to day, emailed its chief executive after the meeting to complain about how the Canva stake had been handled.<\/p>\n Airtree co-founder Craig Blair told this masthead that the firm had backed Canva since 2014 and kept doing so \u201cbecause they\u2019ve consistently delivered on the big goals they\u2019ve set\u201d. It says Canva has never blocked it from selling, that it has not sought liquidity outside the share sales Canva itself has run, and that Fund 1 has already distributed more than five times what its investors put in.<\/p>\n Blackbird, which owns about 10 per cent of Canva, is weighing whether to shift part of its holding into continuation funds so that its investors can take profits without waiting. Co-founder Rick Baker said the plan was still to hold to a float.<\/p>\n But about 5500 staff did not sign up for a lifelong project. Within a fortnight, Canva will hand them shares priced off that $US31 billion figure. Many hold options they were told could make them millionaires on a float that keeps moving further away.<\/p>\n Not everyone inside is patient. On Blind, a forum where posters are verified as employees but stay anonymous, a Canva staffer of four years\u2019 duration wrote in April that the real decisions had shrunk to a small circle around the founders, pointing to constant changes of direction on mobile and AI as proof.<\/p>\n \u201cOver the past 12 to 18 months, there\u2019s been a noticeable shift toward a much more top-down, founder-mode style of operating,\u201d the worker wrote. \u201cIn theory, that can work. It can create speed, clarity and conviction. In practice, it has increasingly felt like decision-making has collapsed into a very small inner circle, with much of the rest of the organisation left to execute rather than think.<\/p>\n \u2018Over the past 12 to 18 months, there\u2019s been a noticeable shift toward a much more top-down, founder-mode style of operating.\u2019<\/p>\n Anonymous Canva employee<\/p>\n \u201cFrom a talent perspective, some of the strongest people I\u2019ve worked with, genuinely thoughtful, product-minded, high-agency people, are either leaving or slowly disengaging. Not because they can\u2019t perform, but because there\u2019s less and less room to. They get routed around, overridden, or boxed in by layers of management whose main strength often seems to be proximity to leadership rather than clarity of thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n A former employee chimed in to say that was why they quit. The post went up four months before the valuation fell.<\/p>\n People close to Canva say the co-founders have always been closely involved and have lately spent more time with the teams on its highest-priority work. They would be more worried, they said, if the company was not willing to change course when the evidence pointed somewhere better.<\/p>\n Questions of strategy<\/p>\n Canva says that more than 98 per cent of America\u2019s 500 biggest companies have someone using it, a figure its executives repeat constantly.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve just closed our strongest quarter yet for enterprise sales, and our B2B business is now generating more than $500 million in revenue,\u201d Obrecht told this masthead.<\/p>\n That is $US500 million a year, counting every business customer from 25 seats up, against total revenue of about $US4 billion. Selling to business is roughly an eighth of the company.<\/p>\n Jason Lemkin, the American software investor who founded the industry conference SaaStr, paid for Canva for eight years and says his use drifted to nothing without him ever deciding to leave. Thumbnails went to one tool, video editing to another, and his team\u2019s AI assistants now produce marketing material without going near Canva. \u201cCanva and Notion did nothing wrong at all. Nothing,\u201d he said on the same 20VC podcast. They just stopped being needed. He reckons Canva is worth about $US12 billion.<\/p>\n O\u2019Driscoll thinks that is far too low: a company growing 25 per cent a year and generating cash would normally trade at several times $US12 billion, he said. The only reason Canva doesn\u2019t is that investors are not yet sure it survives the shift to AI. His reading is that Canva is cheap, and definitely not finished.<\/p>\n An intentional pause<\/p>\n Canva\u2019s answer is that the pause was a choice, not a stumble.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile it\u2019s never easy to intentionally slow things down, it was the right decision for the long-term,\u201d Obrecht told this masthead. \u201cThe outsized demand proved we have a world-class product, but the economics weren\u2019t yet ready for our unique scale. We\u2019ve got those underlying numbers right, and now we\u2019re ready to get it out into the world and accelerate growth.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Canva](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/64e849feee9d7ac125686cd0fb64b517a389d9f4.jpeg\")
Canva co-founder\u00a0Cliff Obrecht (right) in conversation with Stripe\u2019s co-founder and president John Collison at the payment company\u2019s\u00a0Stripe Tour showcase at the ICC in Sydney on Wednesday.
\nSupplied 19th August 2026 <\/p>\n![\"Canva](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1bcb87d158f5c4fdf54efdec9ff988f458b4fbf4.jpeg\")
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Canva founders Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins and Cameron Adams on-stage in LA, announcing AI features.<\/p>\n![\"Canva](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/224c04fec6b6b8b9ccf899f55f51ee52c4382518.jpeg\")
Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht.Dominic Lorrimer<\/p>\n
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