Canva CEO Melanie Perkins comes to the U.S. to woo the design business’s next generation of enterprise clients
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Biden Administration is asking AI companies to help stop nonconsensual AI content, homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall opens up about her job in a rare interview, and Canva is wooing its next generation of enterprise customers. Have a restful weekend!
- Designed for success. Canva cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins was in Los Angeles yesterday for Canva's first big annual event to be held in the U.S. The new location for the Sydney-based company is symbolic. Canva reached 185 million monthly users by first targeting individuals looking for an easier way to design. The company is now aiming to reach C-suite executives. "It's great to be able to be in their backyard," Perkins told me before yesterday's event.
Canva, now valued at $26 billion with $2.3 billion in annual revenue, is doubling down on its suite of enterprise products. It's an evolution I covered in my 2022 profile of Perkins, who cofounded Canva more than a decade ago as an easier way for people to design, from posters to social media graphics. Servicing the needs of Fortune 500 corporations enables Canva to keep growing and make more money atop its freemium model.
Since offering its first enterprise products in 2019, the company has learned more about the day-to-day needs of CIOs and other execs. In 2022, Canva's focus was on the launch of products to compete with Google Docs and Microsoft PowerPoint; now the product changes include features like starring certain assets for easy access across an organization, direct publishing to Meta and Amazon, and more technical tools like "auto-provisioning with SCIM." Its enterprise customers today include Workday, Expedia, and FedEx. Perkins is eager to share stories about how much time Canva has saved those businesses; at Workday, it was 33,000 hours, she says.
Perkins was joined onstage yesterday by Disney CEO Bob Iger, a Canva investor. Iger has spoken before about being inspired by Canva as a way to "unlock" creativity—part of the Disney ethos—but Disney is also known for its stringent brand guidelines, something Canva's new products aim to help companies stick to as more staffers make visual content. "You can be as locked down with a brand template as you want, or as unlocked as you want," she says. "There's the protection side and the unlocking side."
Canva, right now, is locked down in a different sense. Its IPO has been eagerly anticipated for a few years, but the company has chosen to stay private and instead offered liquidity to some employees and investors. "Being private enables us to continue to flesh out exactly who we are and what we're doing," Perkins told me, "and make that really apparent to the world."
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Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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