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1 episodes · 22 quoted claims
Melanie Perkins said Canva's enterprise business grew by 100 over the previous year and cited 95 of the Fortune 500 among its enterprise customers.
“We grew by 100 over last year, 95 of Fortune 500 companies and getting really deep footprints with thousands of people at companies now”
Canva launched its background remover tool in 2019, letting users remove an image background with one click.
“like 2019, we launched background remover, and the whole point of that was you click the background remove button”
In 2011 Canva's founders had a deck called Canvas Chef, before the company was named Canva, that Perkins says resembled the product launched with AI 2.0.
“I'm gonna take us back to 2011 and to a deck that we had, which was called Canvas Chef before Canva was even called Canva.”
In 2017 Canva wrote an internal document called 'getting smart' that predicted search-driven design generated on the fly.
“In 2017, we had this document, we called it getting smart, and we're like, in the future, future, future. There's going to be search driven design”
Perkins said a significant internal breakthrough in October made Canva AI 2.0 feasible and led the company to go all in on it.
“But then in October, there was a significant breakthrough in the company that meant that we could actually do it.”
Perkins said hundreds of Canva employees worked on the Canva AI 2.0 project over several years.
“We've had hundreds of people working on this project for some years to get to this point in time.”
Canva has an in-house research team of about one hundred people working on design AI, according to Perkins.
“we've got a hundred person research team working very specifically on these problems themselves”
Perkins said the first million users of Canva AI 2.0 are being given a free AI pass worth a hundred monthly credits.
“for the 1st million users, we're giving everyone an AI pass, which we're really excited about, so it's a hundred um monthly pass.”
Perkins said Canva's Magic Layers feature recorded 8 million uses in its first four weeks.
“Magic Layers has had 8 million uses in the four weeks since launching.”
Magic Layers, built by Canva's own research team, splits any imported image into editable layers like a Canva template.
“you now take any image from wherever you might generate it into Canva, and then it will actually split it out into layers so you can just edit it like a Canva template.”
Perkins said Canva partners with OpenAI and Anthropic and also uses its own internal models.
“We partner with, um, OpenAI and Anthropic, and then, of course, our own internal models.”
Perkins said the price of large language model queries has fallen about fiftyfold over the previous three years.
“the price is being driven down radically. Like, if you look at the price of an of L L M queries, you know, it's grown down fifty times in the last three years.”
Perkins said Affinity, the design software owned by Canva, has had more than 5 million downloads since its free version was announced.
“Affinity itself has had more than 5 million downloads, um, since, uh, we announced it.”
At its Canva Create event, Canva gave one million people early access to Canva AI 2.0.
“At Canva Create, we gave one million people access to Canva A I 2.0.”
Perkins said about a quarter of a billion people use Canva each month.
“We've got, you know, quarter billion people that use Canva each month.”
Perkins said about 100 million teachers and students use Canva, and that the company launched a free curriculum-aligned content tool called Learn Grid.
“We've got 100 million teachers and students using Canva today, but the access to great tools is like, very divergent”
Perkins said Canva receives more than a million feature wishes a year from users and granted forty of them at Canva Create.
“we get more than one million wishes a year from our community, um, and so we're actually, we have just granted forty of them at the at Canva Create.”
Perkins said Canva AI 2.0 orchestrates Canva's different tools and produces a layered file in Canva's standard format.
“it actually is able to orchestrate it and then create a layered file in canvas standard format.”
Perkins described Canva's original innovation as moving design from pixels to movable objects, and said AI adds a third layer of editing at the level of concepts.
“one of the huge innovations that we had was moving from pixels, where everything was very granular and required deep expertise to be able to move anything around.”
Perkins said that in 2012 Canva pitched an idea called the design engine, predicting other platforms would build their own design tools.
“back in 2012, we had this pitch and we called it. We had the design engine, and we said, like, all these other platforms are gonna like, um, have tools”
Perkins said she uses Canva's coding product, Canva Code, to build prototypes instead of mockups.
“I use Canva code all the time, I used to do a lot of mockups, so now I create use Canva code to create, um, prototypes all the time.”
Perkins said Canva has not chosen a single AI coding tool for its staff and has given employees access to all the leading ones.
“we actually have, like, not selected a winner, we have just like given them everything.”