Canva COO Cliff Obrecht on hitting 260M monthly users and nearly $4B revenue — and why their integrated creative OS beats point solutions

Summary

Canva is tracking toward $4 billion in annual revenue in 2025, growing at roughly high-thirties percent year-over-year, with 260 million monthly active users. The company has been profitable for eight consecutive years, a fact COO Cliff Obrecht attributes to a product-first philosophy rather than growth-at-all-costs spending.

AI integration, not AI disruption

Canva was not blindsided by the generative AI wave, having acquired an AI background-removal company roughly five years ago. What surprised the company was the pace at which image models matured. That acceleration drove the acquisition of Leonardo, an AI company brought in specifically to inject AI capability and accelerate Canva's model roadmap. Canva now runs a dual-track AI strategy: partnering with leading third-party model providers while building proprietary foundational models in areas where it holds a structural data advantage, particularly in design.

Canva's most significant recent AI release is what it describes as the world's first design model that generates fully layered, editable designs, not flattened outputs. It has also shipped AI-assisted video generation with storyboard and timeline tooling, and launched a 3D product generation tool last week.

The integrated OS argument

Obrecht frames Canva's architecture as a decisive competitive advantage over point-solution rivals. Built over ten years, the platform rests on a unified document engine spanning presentations, social graphics, long-form documents, websites, and video, all sharing the same collaboration infrastructure. An AI layer now sits between that document layer and a foundational infrastructure layer covering brand kits, digital asset management, and multi-platform publishing.

The practical result is a workflow that can pull live data from Salesforce, apply a company's brand kit, generate a formatted presentation, deploy it, and track engagement, all within a single environment. Competitors, by Obrecht's account, have built disconnected generative tools without this connective tissue.

Affinity relaunch bridges prosumer and enterprise

Canva acquired Affinity, a professional design suite, 18 months ago. Last week's relaunch of the Affinity suite, made 100% free, generated one million downloads in the first week. Affinity handles pixel-level and vector work for professional designers, with assets pushing directly into Canva for broader organizational use. The two-product architecture lets Canva serve both trained designers and non-technical knowledge workers without forcing either group into an ill-fitting tool.

M&A philosophy at roughly 10 acquisitions

Obrecht says Canva has completed approximately 10 acquisitions and deliberately runs without a dedicated head of M&A. His view is that deal success depends on founder motivation, and that delegating acquisition decisions to a standalone M&A function generates "carnage." The screening criterion he emphasizes is whether a founder wants broader distribution for their technology, making Canva's 260-million-user base a compelling unlock. Founders acquired as far back as eight years ago remain in leadership roles, which he cites as validation of the approach.