How Canva Built a $32B Design Empire (and Why Adobe Should Be Worried)

Canva quietly built a $32B empire — now it's redefining how the world creates with AI.

In this deep dive, I interview Canva Co-founder & CPO Cameron Adams about how the company went from a web-based underdog to the OS for visual content, used by over 240M people every month.

You can also watch it on YouTube, Spotify, or X/Twitter:

Some topics we explore:

1. Why Canva is used by over 240M people every month.

2. The 3-tier Canva AI strategy: deep tech, partnerships, and marketplace.

3. How they're bringing AI video and code generation to their platform.

3. How batch creation and real-time analytics enable mass personalization.

5. Why Canva believes the future of design isn’t about features, but outcomes.

Whether you're a founder, designer, or product nerd, this is a masterclass in scaling creativity at global scale. Hope you enjoy!

Transcript formatted for reading:

Bilawal Sidhu: What happens when you take professional design tools out of the hands of the 1% and give them to everyone? You get Canva, a company that's quietly amassed 240 million monthly active users, powering everything from TikToks to Fortune 500 pitch decks. Now, imagine having a graphic designer, video editor, and creative director at your fingertips, all powered by AI. So, how did Canva pull this off and where are they going next? Today, I'm sitting down with Cameron Adams, Canva's co-founder and chief product officer, to dive deep into how they're building the everything app for visual communication. What the future of human AI collaboration looks like and why AI might just create more creative jobs, not less. Let's get into it.

Cameron Adams: The vision for Canva has always been about reducing this job that could take months down to minutes, and AI is letting us take it from minutes to seconds. You had tools that 1% of the world could possibly use. So we set out to create this product that enabled the other 99% of the world to access design.

Bilawal Sidhu: More than 230 million people design with Canva every month. 373 designs created every single second. 240 million monthly active users. That is a flabbergasting number if you think about it. Now it's just table stakes for making a pitch deck, like, that's the tool you use.

Cameron Adams: So that quickly takes one design that you're creating and multiplies it by 500 and then lets you do that in the space of minutes.

Bilawal Sidhu: Do you expect it to change how people build interactive experiences?

Cameron Adams: It is literally months to create some of these things that you can now generate through Canva code in minutes. Companies like Adobe very much approach it from the opposite direction. So when they try and bring something like a Canva to to life, they just don't have the same DNA.

Bilawal Sidhu: Cameron, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Cameron Adams: Such a pleasure to be here, Bilawal.

Bilawal Sidhu: Congratulations, hot off the presses. Canva is number five on the CNBC Disruptor 50 list. Sounds like an incredible validation of the journey you've been on.

Cameron Adams: That is a pretty good reflection of of where we've been and also where we're going. Still disrupting.

Bilawal Sidhu: Well, speaking of the journey, let's go back to the genesis story. How did Canva go from being a niche design tool to one of the largest SaaS companies in the world, almost reframing the entire market for design and creation tools?

Cameron Adams: Started out in 2012. Design for everyone was a category that did not exist. And we all realized the immense power of design to enable people to achieve their goals, but the fact that it was highly inaccessible to most of the world. You had tools that 1% of the world could possibly use, that they could afford and that they could understand and that they could actually get anything good out of. So we set out to create this product that enabled the other 99% of the world to access design. We started small. Uh we mostly focused on social media in the very early days, but in the intervening decade, we've expanded to presentations, you can create T-shirts, videos, websites, pretty much any visual content can be made on Canva. And it has truly inspired people. We've got now 240 million people that use the product every month, and they use it