Canva India growth: Canva is leveraging its Facebook India communities to build deeper inroads

Design software company Canva’s India business has more than doubled in growth over the last one year and contributed “significantly” to its $2.5-billion annualised revenue run rate, cofounder Cliff Obrecht told ET.According to Obrecht, the Australian startup is leveraging its thriving Facebook-based communities of more than 240,000 freelancers and 10,000 teachers to build deep inroads into the country. Globally, Canva has 200 million monthly active users. The company did not disclose the specific user base in India.

“Localisation has been a key area of focus for Canva in India–we are focused on building a localised product for our Indian community that celebrates its diverse cultural and linguistic nuances,” he told ET.

India is Canva’s fifth-largest market with around 139 million presentations created in the last one year and tools like the photo background remover being one of the most popularly used tools. Social media templates for Instagram are among the most popular in India for Canva.

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The company does not have a physical presence in India yet, but Obrecht said the company’s India team, which works remotely, has nearly doubled in strength in one year.

The design software startup has emerged as a challenger to tech behemoths like Adobe. The company recently undertook multiple secondary sales of its shares, which valued the startup at around $32 billion. In a secondary share sale the proceeds go to the investors selling their shares and do not go to the company.On the company’s India strategy, Obrecht said the idea is to localise the features to cater to the needs of the growing community of Indian content creators and social media influencers.

“We work with over 120 Indian creators who have created thousands of localised templates for us and engage our community with their compelling designs,” he said.

Canva recently launched its ‘Enterprise Subscription’ product targeted at large companies that can start using Canva at a corporate level. Obrecht said the company has seen revenue from this line of business jump 300% in the last one year.

“About 95% of Fortune 500 (companies) are using Canva and we have signed an array of big deals with some of the largest global companies, including Atlassian, HP, NYSE, and DHL Express,” he said.

As a company, Canva has been leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to make designing simple and powerful. It has undertaken multiple acquisitions to strengthen its product suite. In August this year, Canva acquired Leonardo.ai and launched Dream Lab, its generative AI tool that can convert text instructions into detailed photos and graphics.

“Dream Lab will help with everything from creating storyboards for marketing campaigns to developing on-brand stock images in a company’s style,” he said.