Duncan Clark, European head of the Australian design platform Canva, took the stage at Breakit's annual event SaaS Summit on Thursday. He shared insights into how the company is currently working with AI – but also had another reason for flying here. “I’m actually here in Stockholm to look for new talent for Canva. So I’ll be trying to meet the smartest people in Stockholm – if you know anyone, let me know,” he said with a wink. Duncan Clark began his career as a data journalist at the British The Guardian, then went on to found the startup Flourish, a platform that turns data into visual stories on a large scale. In 2022, Flourish was sold to Canva, and Duncan Clark eventually became the head of the company. Since then, he has been in charge of everything related to Canva in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, with a special focus on data visualization. “Canva exploded with the pandemic. It was a crisis, but for creative people, it was also an opportunity and a catalyst. Suddenly, these people had both time and tools to publish visual content on a scale we’ve never seen before,” he recalls. [https://cdn.breakit.se/assets/media/images/cb4f60ee12035b786d41b4b0b6c11410.jpeg] Duncan Clark. Photo: John Resborn Today, the platform has 240 million monthly users and recently set a record in the number of downloaded designs – 1 billion. In Sweden, they’ve just surpassed 1.5 million designs every month. “These are crazy numbers,” says Duncan Clark. Canva is currently used by sales teams, marketers, and HR teams. “Salespeople design pitch decks, and HR teams have realized they can no longer engage employees with a few bullet points in an email – they need to capture attention visually.” FOCUSING ON GROWTH Over the past two years, Canva has heavily invested in AI, says Duncan Clark. Among other things, by allowing users to prompt different designs and remove backgrounds from images. The in-house tool, Magic Switch, turns documents into presentations. The company has also started collaborating with ChatGPT. “We were a launch partner for the ChatGPT app integration. Users can generate and edit Canva designs directly within the AI agent.” Canva offers several subscription options for its customers. They have a free version, and then Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans. The latter is designed for larger organizations. While other companies struggle to acquire paying customers, Canva takes a slightly different approach. Canva’s CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins stated in September 2024 that the company had around 21 million paying users. “Roughly speaking, I’d say probably nine out of ten users use Canva for free,” says Duncan Clark from the stage. “And we’re totally okay with that. Canva has always had a philosophy of being generous, and this is our way of achieving growth.” He continues: “We don’t want to say, ‘here’s two months free, and then you have to pay.’ You can’t position yourself like that. To truly win, you need to say, here’s something genuinely useful, and here’s a way to contribute to our commercial growth.” Last year, Canva generated $2.7 billion in revenue, which is about 29 billion SEK. This represents a 35% increase compared to 2023.
