By Scott Harris
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Design platforms are notoriously complex. That is, they were until Canva came along.
Since its founding in 2013, Canva has become the world’s most popular destination for designing and developing visual content. The Sydney, Australia-based company now sees hundreds of millions of active monthly users and is valued at $42 billion.
The secret? Keeping things simple in a complicated landscape, for the platform itself as well as Canva’s corporate community.
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“Before Canva, design tools were too complex and expensive,” Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told Newsweek. “We wanted to change that, and we now help hundreds of millions ofpeopleto create everything from pitch decks to websites and marketing campaigns. That simplicity is a huge part of what our customers love.”
The service caught on in part because it was easier to use than offerings from competitors like Adobe, which provide users with granular control but come with a steep learning curve. Under co-founders Obrecht, Melanie Perkins and Cameron Adams, Canva was a rocket out of the gate, reaching 50 million designs created by 2015 and a $1 billion valuation in its first five years, largely thanks to its approachable drag-and-drop interface.
That same sense of simplicity was reflected in the way Canva moved to embrace AI — a broad societal change the company spotted early. It initially turned heads in 2023 with its AI suite Magic Studio. According to the company, Canva’s AI offerings are now the third-most-used AI product in the world. The key was making a tall task more manageable.
“Rather than expecting people to learn prompts, models or agents, we’re focused on building workhorses that hide all of that complexity so people can spend less time figuring out the technology and more time getting things done,” Obrecht said.
According to Obrecht, one of the biggest milestones in company history came in April 2026 with the launch of Canva AI 2.0. The platform now generates fully layered, editable output from a single prompt, all while gaining intelligence as it goes.
“We’d spent years investing in the underlying research, infrastructure and product, so finally launching it was a huge milestone,” Obrecht said. “It was the moment we went from being a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools, and we’ve only scratched the surface of that.”
Canva continues to be an enthusiastic AI adopter, not just in the tools it offers but within its own walls. One example is AI Discovery Week, a twice-yearly week of learning when employees put normal work aside to experiment and learn with AI.
According to Obrecht, the AI ripple effect is evident throughout Canva’s internal culture.
“Shipping cycles are getting shorter, smaller teams can achieve much more, and AI is letting us grow through productivity rather than just adding more people,” he said.
It stands to reason AI will continue to figure prominently for Canva, as it will for many companies and people. But it’s a focus on the end goal — keeping things as simple as possible in the process — that Obrecht said keeps Canva centered.
“Our goal is to be the best place in the world to create visual content, and we’re continuing to put a huge amount of focus and energy into that,” Obrecht said. “We still feel like we're only getting started, and every few months we unlock things we couldn’t have built before… We’ve always focused on making complex things simple, and more than a decade later, that still drives everything we do today.”
Canva is ranked by Newsweek as one of the Most Trusted Brands in the U.S. To see a full list of the Most Trusted Brands, click here.
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