Canva adds video to its pro design toolset and steps up its enterprise play

Another week, another two acquisitions for Canva, the fast-growing visual design vendor that just closed 2025 on a $4 billion revenue run rate and is rapidly expanding its enterprise presence. Last Tuesday, it announced the acquisitions of MangoAI, a US-based startup that uses AI to automatically optimize video advertising on the fly by analyzing ad platform metrics, and Cavalry, a UK-based 2D animation platform that will complement the Affinity pro design tools that Canva acquired in 2024. On Thursday, I joined an analyst day at Canva's EMEA headquarters in London to find out more about the company's strategy for growing its enterprise market share.

Canva was founded in Australia in 2013 with a mission to democratize visual design, and having grown to a global user base of over 265 million monthly active users and more than 31 million paying seats, it's made huge strides towards fulfilling that goal. Most of that user base is among consumers, individual professionals and small businesses, but around an eighth of its revenues — $500 million — now come from enterprise accounts, according to the company. It's been adding features to appeal to the enterprise market over the past five years, and in 2024 launched a dedicated Canva Enterprise offering.

Affinity comes on board

It took another big step later that year when it acquired Serif, the UK-based maker of the popular Affinity suite of professional creative design tools, broadening its user base to include professional designers. Serif had built a loyal user base who liked its affordable perpetual licensing model — many of whom were skeptical about Canva's intentions and feared the cloud-native vendor might start demanding an annual subscription. But last fall, the company launched a new, full-featured version of the suite that is completely free to download and use, choosing to charge a subscription only for optional AI add-ons and integration to Canva workflows. The new version has already had over four million downloads, and existing users have also started to move over, although many of these will wait until the new version becomes available on iPad, which is a popular platform among Affinity users.

The new Affinity is also notable for combining the three capabilities of its previous products — vector graphics, photo editing, and layout tools — into a single product that combines all the functionality of each of the separate products. This week's acquisition of Cavalry will further expand those capabilities by adding 2D animation. This is a product that has already achieved significant market presence in its own right and cites Amazon, Meta, Google and Netflix as examples of the creative and technology companies among its customer base. Taking an implicit side-swipe against the complexity and cost of rival tools from its incumbent competitor Adobe, Cliff Obrecht, Co-founder and COO of Canva, said in a press statement:

We’ve always believed creative tools should be accessible to everyone, and we’re seeing that reflected in how the design community is responding. Affinity has already surpassed four million downloads in just a few months. Now, with Cavalry joining Canva, we’re taking another big step toward helping professional designers break free from bloated and expensive tools, bringing everything from vector to motion design into one powerful creative suite.

Enterprise strategy

For the enterprise market, Canva's product set now extends from DIY tools that anyone can use to create and edit visual designs, documents and messages, through to very powerful professional design products. But it's the ability to share and edit designs and projects across teams that seems to be at the heart of its success in the enterprise, based on the experiences of customers who spoke at last Thursday's event and Canva's own testimony. We'll dig into what those customers said in a follow-up article.

One of the platform's strengths is that all designs share a single file format — or two now with the addition of the Affinity .af file type, with the Canva platform enabling designs and elements to move between the two. The ability to edit and adapt artwork — within brand guidelines, of course — has produced massive time and cost savings compared to the traditional pattern of passing PDFs around and then having to either recreate the design from scratch or go back to the originator to ask for changes. With marketing users accounting for more than half of Canva's enterprise user base, there's now a trend towards clients asking their agencies — or vice-versa — to standardize on Canva when sending files. This means the recipient can easily make changes or add comments without the need to convert files or ask for a new version each time someone wants to change a word, translate into a different language, or reformat for a new social media platform.

Canva's enterprise sales strategy is to build on the inroads it's making due to organic acoption of its products by individuals and teams within an organization, and then approaching the central IT buying team with a proposal to consolidate that spend into a formal enterprise contract. Duncan Clark, Head of EMEA, explains;

We go into an organization and we say, 'Hey, it's great to see that there are 2-3,000 users in your organization already using Canva on your email addresses, and probably another 2-3,000 who are registered on their personal Gmail but they're using it for your company, we've got no way to know.' And we say, 'Well, wouldn't you want to bring all that into SSO? Wouldn't you want to have single proper billing? Get rid of people using credit cards, expensing all the other stuff? Make sure you've got the indemnity for your AI use and all the other things you want for enterprise.'

The vendor has made sure that it caters to all of the requirements enterprise IT look for around compliance and governance, extending from SSO capabilities to SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification, full GDPR compliance, to admin APIs and reporting dashboards. It has also recently added the ability to offer EU data residency from a data center in Germany.

Expanding the footprint

The new Affinity offering complements that strategy with an alternative to high-end professional design tools, in particulary Adobe's. Ella Vawdrey, Head of Product, Pro Design says:

Winning professional creatives is key to winning visual communication. They have that influencing factor of setting the tone for the brand marketing teams. They're influencing what is going to be the collaborative system their companies are on. They are really a key part. It's not just about expanding the seats for Canva. It's about expanding our enterprise positioning and the whole footprint for our enterprise play... Our vision is that professional creatives can craft professional assets with pro design tools such as Affinity and scale them on Canva to teams, markets and channels.

Making Affinity free-of-charge has the extra benefit of removing the need to pay seat licenses for users to be able to open and view designs made with the tool. In an enterprise, those users will still be paying a Canva license to collaborate on the design, but removing the barrier of unreadable files is a significant benefit. Clark explains:

We're hearing from so many companies, they're just sick of being tied into proprietary file formats. You know, you need a $100-a-month Adobe subscription to occasionally open an InDesign file. So we're saying anyone, for the future of time, will be able to open an .af file. But if you've got a user who wants to use it in an enterprise way, on the SSO, then just buy a Canva seat.

My take

Canva's enterprise sales strategy reminds me of how Salesforce first started building its presence in the enterprise market — sales teams were independently signing up for the product and many organizations had hundreds or even thousands of users before the IT team had any inkling what was going on. Often it was possible to cut costs by consolidating these unsanctioned purchases into a single contract, although usage soon expanded beyond that starting point. Today, the various security and compliance benefits of IT taking charge of these purchases are significant too, of course, giving Canva an even stronger argument. Offering the ability to consolidate various capabilities on a single vendor is another proposition that appeals to IT buyers these days.

Going further back in time, I'm also reminded of how Microsoft was able to make inroads against the former dominant spreadsheet vendor, Lotus, by ensuring Excel could read its rival's file format. It's almost as though the Canva team have read all the how-to guides to enterprise penetration against an established incumbent — and with Adobe's market dominance, Canva needs all the help it can get. By taking out costs, removing the file format barrier, and emphasizing the ability to collaborate between professional design teams and other users, Canva is targeting several points where Adobe is vulnerable. So far, the strategy seems to be making an impact. In a follow-up article I'll share some of what we heard from a panel of enterprise customers last week, and there were some interesting insights too into Canva's AI strategy, which I'll get to in a third article.