Hello, and welcome back to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. Canva is becoming the go-to design platform for how the world communicates visually and the numbers prove that out: The company closed 2025 with $4 billion in ARR, up from $3.5 billion just months earlier, with 265 million monthly active users. How did they got there?

Enterprise was the unexpected accelerant. Launched two years ago, Canva's B2B offering already clears $500 million in ARR, growing faster than the founders anticipated. While the company has invested heavily in AI technology, the pitch for enterprise was full editability and brand control that AI-generated content alone can't provide.

They’ve also matured with worldwide business headwinds. Where Canva once grew through SEO, AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT now funnel users directly to the platform via Canva's MCP server, placing it among the top 10 referred domains from LLMs.

With two new acquisitions, a major AI reveal in April, and an IPO on the horizon, the growth curve shows no signs of flattening. Inc. spoke with co-founder and chief product officer, Cameron Adams to talk strategy, success, and what comes next.

In this article you’ll find:

BY JENNIFER CONRAD, SENIOR WRITER

The design software company’s bets on AI and enterprise are paying off.

Canva, the design platform known for its easy-to-use tools and candy-colored aesthetics, just hit a new revenue milestone, ending 2025 with $4 billion in annual recurring revenue, up from $3.5 billion in October 2025.

The Sydney-based company also grew its monthly active user base by 20 percent last year, ending the year at 265 million monthly active users and 31.2 million paid users. Canva was among the first to recognize AI’s power to transform design and has forged thriving partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic. Additionally, its enterprise business has doubled each year since it launched in May 2024, including a Hamilton-style rap performance at that year’s Canva Create conference in Los Angeles.

But co-founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adams aren’t resting on their laurels. On Monday, Canva 2D animation tool Cavalry and MangoAI, which uses AI to create better video ads. And the company, founded in 2013, is set to announce a new slate of AI features at Canva Create this April 9 and is rumored to be gearing up for an IPO. (But will we get a new musical number?)

“We’re always thinking about disrupting ourselves, and we feel like we’re still only 1 percent of the way there,” says Cameron Adams, who is also the company’s chief product officer. “There is so much opportunity ahead for us, and we’re mapping out the growth path to capitalize on it.”

Adams spoke to Inc. about how Canva exceeded even the founders’ expectations in 2025 and what’s next for the company in 2026.

Cameron, how has your year been so far?

It’s looking like a good one. At our stage, growing becomes increasingly hard every year. But we always set big goals and make sure we meet or exceed them.

With enterprise, we felt a little behind the ball a few years ago. We had really strong grounding in small businesses and individuals, and enterprise wasn’t something we had focused on for a long time. We started looking more deeply into enterprise because we saw pockets of people using Canva within large organizations, and we needed to figure out how to unlock them properly. It was very different from having a one-on-one relationship with a small-business owner who can immediately make a decision, put a credit card down, and pay for Canva.

We launched our fully fledged enterprise product two years ago now, so that’s been an amazing area of growth. We’re now sitting on over $500 million in ARR just from B2B alone. We thought it would probably take longer than it would to hit this level of growth.

My editor likes to point out that a spike in ARR can just be a sign of a good month. How do you ensure you’re really retaining people?

We’ve got very rigorous metrics, and we’re constantly monitoring them. Forecasting is extremely important for mapping out where we expect growth next year, which initiatives we should invest in, and where we might need to dive deeper into a particular product area or create a new product to enable that growth. We’ve been profitable for the past seven years in a row. You can only do that when you have a strong handle on your figures and on your funnel, your model, where your user growth is coming from, which markets you’re operating in, and where your revenue’s coming from.

Larger companies are often reluctant to switch from legacy software platforms or to pay for new software licenses. Why do you think the enterprise version of Canva has been so successful?

We’ve been entering a new world for the past decade, a very visual world, one that requires video-first creation, interactivity, and a new engagement with your audience. Canva just smashes that brief. It’s truly democratizing design and democratizing visual communication.

We’ve really owned this category, and no one else is doing that at scale. Canva integrates all the things enterprises need from their brand, to assets, to sharing all the designs that their staff is creating across the company.

When we last spoke in October, you’d just introduced new AI features, including the Canva Design Model, a generative AI model that creates editable Canva designs. How do you see AI influencing design in the future?

We want people to fully express their creativity. We all know there’s this gap between asking AI for something and the final output you’re actually proud to put out, and not just AI slop. It’s that last 20 percent of finesse and polish and putting your own touch into something that really makes it quality content. The way people express themselves, the way they connect with their audience, and the insight and expertise they bring are always going to take content and communication to the next level.

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