The startup, best known for helping users create social media graphics, is trying to carve out space in a market long dominated by Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. 

“Productivity and creativity have been separated for a long-time for no really good reason,” says Cameron Adams, Canva’s cofounder and chief product officer. Incumbent products are “a bit old-school,” he adds, arguing that they don’t match how people now produce strategy documents and pitch decks.

Still, Canva’s push into productivity software comes amid a delicate transition to offer more AI services. These new services, more popular than expected among Canva’s users than executives expected, have driven up costs and forced the startup to cut its revenue growth forecast to 20%.

Canva debuted Visual Suite, its suite of productivty tools, in 2022, and overhauled it in April 2025 to add spreadsheets and coding tools. Docs is now the company’s third-most popular design type, with adoption more than tripling in the past three years.

Mobile is becoming an increasingly important platform for Canva. More than half of Canva presentations created in Southeast Asia start on a phone, rising to three in five in the Philippines and nearly two in three in Indonesia. 

Seventy-five percent of Indonesian users access Canva through a mobile device, according to Adams, who notes that mobile-first markets in Asia and Africa see the phone as a productivity device far more than users in the U.S. or Europe might. “There are jobs that people skew more towards on mobile than they do on desktop,” he says. “We see a lot of people commenting on documents on mobile, so we privilege that sort of behavior on the mobile device.”

AI is making the phone a more credible work machine, allowing users to suggest changes verbally without needing to resort to a phone’s tiny keyboard. “Voice is a lot more usable in an AI format: I can quickly hit the microphone and spit out my thoughts. I don’t really have to structure it much,” Adams says.

That matters all the more in markets where many users are on weaker Android phones. “Performance becomes critical, particularly in Asia,” Adams says. “We’ve had a whole heap of engineers on that to make sure that Canva is a quick and stable experience when people use it on their phone.”

Canva has broader AI ambitions. The startup now has the world’s third-most used AI web product and the fourth-most used AI mobile app, according to calculations by venture firm a16z in March. It released Canva AI 2.0, a suite of agentic tools that build designs from conversational prompts and connect to apps like Gmail and Slack, in April.

Still, Canva has struggled to keep the AI costs to a manageable level. CEO Melanie Perkins admitted to Fortune last month that Canva “needed to reduce the cost of completing an AI task” before rolling out features more broadly to its users. 

Canva’s last known valuation was $42 billion, following an employee share sale in August 2025. Chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht told Fortune in April that shares were still trading around that level. He separately told Australian outlet Capital Brief that Canva was targeting a 2027 IPO as it built out its AI services.

For Adams, however, Canva’s aim is not to use AI to eliminate the work of creating and refining a design. “If you can ask AI to create an image, a video, or a new design for you that’s higher quality than what you could achieve before, that’s a win,” Adams says. But he argues users can’t simply “hit send” on what AI produces: they need a platform to “dive in, move things around, change the words” before passing it to teammates.

The main point, Adams says, is to bring the “human element into it,” and move Canva “beyond AI slop.”