One of the biggest design platforms in the world today wasn’t built by Adobe, Microsoft, or Google. A startup built it with a mission to make visual communication accessible to everyone.

When Melanie Perkins first pitched her fledgling design platform to Silicon Valley investors, she faced over a hundred rejections. The concept—a browser-based tool that could make design accessible to anyone—didn’t appeal to venture capitalists accustomed to backing enterprise software. Would businesses really need simplified design tools when they already had professional designers and complex software suites?

Just over ten years later, that question has been answered. Canva is valued at $26 billion. It has over 220 million monthly active users spanning 190 countries, and over 90% of the Fortune 500 use its design tools in some capacity.

However, for many business professionals, Canva still carries the faint whiff of triviality. It’s a tool for small businesses, influencers, or student projects. Easy to use, accessible, colourful — but not serious. In 2025, that perception is not only wrong; it’s dangerously outdated.

What makes Canva interesting isn’t its growth. It’s not even its remarkable female founder. It's how the company identified—then bridged—the gap between our increasingly visual world and the limited number of people equipped to communicate in it.

While Canva started out to attack a clear market failure–design tools that were too complex for most people who needed them in a visual world–it seems the company isn’t content to stop there. As we’ll see as we unfold Canva’s story, having democratised design for the masses, they want to become essential infrastructure for enterprise too.

Canva’s Origin Story

Canva’s story begins in 2006 in Perth, Australia, with 19-year-old university student, Melanie Perkins. Frustrated by the complexity of traditional design software, Perkins envisioned an easier, more accessible way for everyone to create designs.

Rather than accept the status quo, Perkins and her co-founder Cliff Obrecht built a solution. The product they launched to test their ideas was Fusion Books, an online design platform that simplified the creation of school yearbooks using drag-and-drop tools and templates. The success of Fusion Books (it became Australia’s largest yearbook company) served as a proving ground for their concept.

But Perkins saw a much bigger opportunity. What if the principles behind Fusion Books could democratise design globally?

A chance meeting with Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai at a conference gave Perkins an opening. In 2012, after securing early investment and bringing in Cameron Adams, a former Google engineer, as technical co-founder, Canva was born. A year later, in 2013, it launched to the public with a waitlist of 50,000 eager users.

Democratising Design

Having identified a problem and a vast under-served audience, Canva set out on its mission “to empower the world to design.”

In a world where design software was expensive and mastering it took months, Canva made it possible for a total beginner to create a polished design in minutes and for free. The vision was to break down the barriers and provide intuitive, user-friendly tools so that anyone could create professional-quality designs.

Need a scroll stopping social media graphic or video? Canva offered a vast library of pre-designed templates. Users only needed to fire up its intuitive drag-and-drop editor and replace text and images. Want to design something from scratch? The company offered millions of stock photographs, videos and animations, illustrations, icons, and fonts, giving users a rich repository of assets at their fingertips.

Fuelled by its freemium offer, growth was rapid. By the end of 2014, Canva had over 100,000 active users. Guy Kawasaki, Apple's former Chief Evangelist, joined the team to help drive global adoption.

Canva continued to expand its scope. Canva for Work (later rebranded as Canva Pro) launched in 2015, introducing team collaboration and brand management features aimed at small businesses and growing companies. They built mobile apps to reach users beyond the desktop, launched in 100 languages to spread design around the world, and built out a design marketplace to enable graphic designers to contribute designs and earn royalties. Plus more besides.

Entering the Enterprise Arena

As Canva’s user numbers surged, it started to make the move from being a helpful tool for individuals and small teams to becoming serious about enterprise-level functionality.

The 2020 pandemic turbocharged the platform’s relevance. Remote workforces needed fast, flexible tools to create visual content without relying on overloaded design teams or complex software suites.

A series of strategic acquisitions deepened its offering:

Zeetings, a collaborative presentation platform, signalling a shift towards business communications beyond simple social media posts.
Pexels and Pixabay, huge free stock image libraries, bringing more than one million free images to the platform.
Smartmockups, a one-click templating tool that helps designers visualise what their designs would look like on products.
Kaleido, introduced groundbreaking visual AI background removal.
Flourish, a data visualisation platform.

These moves expanded Canva's capabilities beyond graphic design into presentations, video, website creation, and data storytelling. Canva also launched its first version of Visual Suite, including Docs, Websites and Whiteboards, and Canva Teams–its first explicit enterprise offering.

It was the company’s opening gambit as it began positioning itself as an all-in-one platform for creative communication and collaboration.

“As we celebrate the end of our first decade, we’re entering the next one focused not only on empowering every individual to design, but on empowering every organisation too.”

In 2024, the company rolled out a new, customisable user interface aimed at improving workflow efficiency. They also launched a new Canva Enterprise subscription tier for large organisations. Alongside Enterprise, Canva launched:

Canva Work Kits: Tailored template collections for specific departments like Marketing, HR, Sales, and Creative (e.g., onboarding decks, sales reports, campaign templates) to “make every employee a designer”.
Canva Courses: Allows organisations to turn Canva designs (presentations, docs, videos) into interactive courses for internal training and development.
Enhanced AI (Magic Studio): Introduced new capabilities like 'Text to Graphic' generation and improved AI for Magic Design and Resize & Magic Switch.

2024 also saw Canva’s acquisition of Serif, the makers of the Affinity suite — Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher.

The Affinity acquisition changed the game. Until that point, Canva had been firmly focused on non-designers. Affinity’s professional-grade tools brought serious creative capability into the Canva ecosystem, allowing it to serve both ends of the market: the self-service amateur and the demanding professional designer.

For the time being, the Affinity suite remains separate, however it will be interesting to see how Canva integrates it into its broader collaboration ecosystem.

Canva Create 2025: The Next Phase

At Canva Create 2025, Canva unveiled the full scale of its ambitions.

The core announcement was Visual Suite 2.0 — a unified, enterprise-grade platform designed to bridge the gap between productivity and creativity. The new announcements included:

Canva Sheets: A visual spreadsheet tool designed to bridge data management and design.
Magic Studio at Scale: AI-powered tools for bulk content generation and mass editing.
Magic Charts: Automated data visualisation based on structured inputs.
Canva AI: A cross-platform creative assistant for generating images, text, videos, and layouts.
Canva Code: A “vibe coding” environment for building interactive content and micro-websites.
Enhanced Photo Editor: AI-driven editing tools offering more precision and customisation.

Beyond feature launches, Canva demonstrated deeper integrations with enterprise solutions, embedding itself into the everyday workflow of large organisations. These include Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, Salesforce, Slack, Hubspot, and Mailchimp.

In other words, Canva is aiming to become the place where the vast majority of everyday visual communication happens — presentations, proposals, reports, onboarding materials, marketing assets, social content, and internal documentation. All underpinned by the data that drives business forward.

Why B2B Should Be Paying Attention

Business is built on communication. Internal collaboration, training, reports, pitch decks, marketing assets, client deliverables — and all of them increasingly rely on strong visual execution.

While many professional services firms have established Adobe Creative Cloud workflows and in-house design teams, Canva offers a compellingly different value proposition.

Empowers Non-Designers: Instead of central marketing or design teams serving as bottlenecks, business development teams, HR managers, and subject matter experts can create visually credible materials — quickly, independently, and on-brand.
Employee Generated Content: Professionals looking to build their individual profiles can quickly create polished LinkedIn posts, presentation slides for speaking engagements, simple explainer videos, or graphics for blog posts, amplifying the reach and influence of the company.
Speed and Efficiency: Marketing teams can create rapid variations of campaign assets, social media graphics, and simple video explainers. Features like 'Bulk Create' can automate updating text and images across multiple designs. This frees up professional designers for more complex, high-value strategic work.
Brand Consistency: Canva’s Teams and Enterprise offerings include 'Brand Kits' – centralised libraries for logos, colour palettes, and fonts. Admins can also lock templates to ensure all content created across the firm adheres to brand guidelines, a crucial aspect for professional services firms maintaining a consistent image. Advanced controls in Enterprise allow managing access and external sharing.
Collaboration: Canva allows multiple users to work on designs simultaneously, leave comments, and easily share work – useful for team-based projects and client feedback loops. Suggested editing features further streamline collaboration.
Cost-Effectiveness: While not replacing Adobe for high-end design, Canva's tiered pricing can be a cost-effective solution for routine design tasks within the firm.
Ease of Use: The steep learning curve associated with traditional design software is eliminated. Professionals can jump in and create impactful visuals almost immediately.
Accessibility: Being web-based, Canva is accessible from anywhere, on various devices, facilitating content creation on the go.

However, decentralising design is not without its risks. Handled well, Canva becomes a force multiplier. Handled poorly, it can lead to a flood of off-brand, low-quality outputs.

Firms must consider:

Governance: Who controls template creation? How are Brand Kits managed? What approvals are needed for external-facing materials?
Training: Non-designers need basic visual literacy. Good templates help, but users must understand hierarchy, clarity, and brand voice.
Differentiation: Over-reliance on standard templates can lead to bland, undifferentiated communication.
Scope clarity: Firms must decide which tasks Canva should support and where professional design support remains essential.

Canva’s Lessons for B2B Communication

For most established professional services firms, Canva isn't an Adobe killer. At least, not yet.

Adobe Creative Cloud remains the industry standard for complex, bespoke design work executed by trained professionals. Canva excels at democratising design for everyone else, enabling speed, scale, and brand consistency for everyday visual communication needs.

The Affinity acquisition, however, potentially bridges the gap, offering professional-grade tools under the Canva umbrella, which could appeal to firms looking to consolidate tools or offer alternatives.

Canva's trajectory points towards it becoming an all-encompassing visual communication suite that is deeply integrated with AI and workplace tools. Its focus on enterprise solutions and the acquisition of professional tools signal its ambition to be indispensable not just for individuals and small businesses, but for large, complex organisations.

As we’ve seen, Canva's story is one of identifying a genuine need, relentlessly pursuing a vision, and strategically evolving to meet market demands. Its history shows that you would be a fool to underestimate its potential. From a simple WYSIWYG web-based tool, it has become a formidable platform impacting how millions communicate visually.

Canva’s story is no longer just about bringing design to the masses. It is a case study in how business communication is being reshaped — faster, more visual, more decentralised, and more reliant on AI augmentation.

Ignoring its potential means missing out on a powerful lever for marketing, internal comms, and individual professional growth. It’s time for B2B leaders to look beyond the perception of Canva as just a social media tool and recognise its strategic value in the modern professional services landscape.

From client presentations to internal documentation, the right approach can transform how your entire organisation communicates. Need help to develop that approach? That's exactly what we do.

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