How Canva is winning India: Local templates, AI tools and flexible pricing fuel 4th-largest market growth

With India now its fourth-largest market globally, Canva is doubling down on localisation, AI-powered design, and enterprise solutions. From custom templates for regional festivals to flexible subscriptions, the platform is tailoring its approach for Indian users. “It’s a real opportunity to bring a truly local product to every person across India,” says Cameron Adams, co-founder of Canva in a conversation with Fortune India. With over $2.5 billion in annual revenue and 220 million users worldwide, Canva now eyes the next big milestone—crossing a billion users, with India playing a central role.

Q: You've had a very interesting year in 2024, AI has been a huge focus of all your launches this year, right from Canva Create to the recent Dream Lab you launched in October. What are you most excited about going forward for 2025?

A: I think there's two key things that I'm excited about. Continued collaboration in creating designs. For a long time, Canva was about individuals using Canva to design things but in the last few years, we've really seen people using Canva together in teams—at businesses, enterprises, and education institutions. Fostering that collaboration between people and the shared ownership of design and brand is really important for us this year and beyond.

And of course, AI (artificial intelligence), which is the topic that everyone's talking about. We've really evolved the way we think about AI in our product over the last three or four years. In 2025, we're really keen to make sure that AI is acting as a true creative partner for people—that it's there whenever you need it, that it's there to help you out, that it's a conversation you can have with it. Ultimately, it improves the end product and all the processes you have along the way.

Q: What importance does India hold for you? How is it different from other markets? How do you tailor your strategies to the Indian consumers? Is it challenging to keep tailoring it from region to region, or is it more of a holistic umbrella approach?

A: I wouldn't say it's a challenge, but it's a real opportunity to bring a truly local product to every person across India. I know that different parts of India have different needs themselves.

We've focused on internationalising our products at Canva for a very long time. We started back in 2016, and in 2017, we actually put out our first Indian translation of the product. Since then, the way we think about the Indian market and localising it properly has evolved massively.

So it's not just the words that you see in the app—it's every piece of content that you see, the inroads people have into finding Canva in the first place, the landing pages they end up on, the photographs and illustrations they use, and the templates they use for different events throughout the year.

I see it as a real opportunity to bring a truly local product to the Indian market, and having a really strong local Canva team is important for that. We've actually doubled the team in the last year, which means we can offer an even better local experience to all Indians.

Q: Visual designs are often dictated by their cultural leanings. What challenges do you face catering to different regions in the world?

A: The culture is very different. It's extremely vibrant here in India, and you also have a very strong artistic and artisanal background.

I was talking about this with a professor yesterday at IIT, about how rich the heritage of India's culture is, and we try to bring that to the Canva product. So when we think about the style of content you need—whether that's illustrations, photographs, videos, or music—representing that rich heritage of India is super important to making it the right product for India.

Q: How important is AI for design making, and what impact can it have in scaling up businesses?

A: I think AI can have tremendous impacts across the board. There are so many different ways in which it can help people out.

At an individual level, it can help you brainstorm ideas and find the right one you want to move forward with—and then take that idea and put it into action. That might be creating the right image you need for marketing or changing the form of a design.

For example, you might start with a portrait Instagram reel and want to convert that to a LinkedIn post. AI can help you transfer that content across different mediums. It can also help you reach your end audience in a better way by understanding who you're talking to, suggesting how you might want to speak to them—the different words you use—and ultimately producing a better design for your customers. On an individual level, that’s how AI can help.

We're also seeing real uplifts for teams as well. When teams need to stay on brand and send the same message, AI can help them do that.

We have something called Canva for Teams, which enables people to work together inside Canva. As part of that, you can have a brand kit—a collection of colours, fonts, imagery, and tone of voice that represents your brand. It enables your whole team to stay on brand and send the same message.

We actually use AI to take your tone of voice—how your brand or organisation speaks—and enable you to generate text based on that tone.

For example, if you're running a marketing campaign, you can write your quick thoughts and get AI to turn them into something your brand would say. That way, you can send that message out confidently, knowing your brand team would be happy with it.

So that's one of the key ways AI is helping teams as well.

Q: Why continue to use complex designing tools if AI can do it for you? With AI-generated content becoming mainstream, do you see a risk of creativity being diluted, and how is Canva addressing this concern?

A: I don't think so. The way that we're seeing it used is through enhancing creativity and giving people the ability to explore even more. We see it even on our internal team when we're creating an event or a brand moment, they actually use it a lot to generate ideas. They storyboard with it, they'll map out the flow of an event, they'll be able to keyframe that out using our magic media tool. And it helps them explore new ideas much faster, which means that we can land on the right idea, one that we're more confident in. And when we've got that confidence, we can then press the accelerator, we can start producing all the high-quality assets out of it, we can produce the final designs that we need to make that come to life. It's a real enabler. And I've seen quite a few academic studies as well that have been looking at AI and creativity and how humans are benefiting from it. And by and large, people are actually benefiting from it the most. They're seeing increased efficiency, it's helping them do their jobs better, and they're ending up with better outcomes from it.

Q: With AI, how do you envision the future of design roles? How will they look like?

A: I think there's still a massive role for designers to play in the future. But as we've seen with Canva over the last decade and a half, democratising design and putting it in the hands of everyone actually benefits everyone, from professional designers through to non-designers as well. And we're seeing the same trend with AI—that the more power and ability to explore that you put into people's hands, the more engaging it is for the whole team. You can have a product manager who comes up with some mock-ups and enables them to have a better conversation with their designer when they both collaborate together. We're also seeing designers being able to mock up things faster and take them further without needing an engineer to maybe step in, so they can explore and prototype and find the right thing, so that when they do start talking to an engineer, they have a better idea of what they want, and it reduces the back and forth. I think in every role you're seeing AI really helps facilitate conversations between different types of people, but the team fundamentally stays the same. You still need a product manager, you still need a designer, you still need an engineer and a marketer. It's just that their jobs are changing and the skills that they need to do their jobs are changing.

Q: Do you think that AI is creating as many jobs as it is disrupting?

A: I think when you look at the trend in how technology affects jobs, it's very clear that technology always enables more jobs. It's happened over the last 200 years—every time a new innovation has come in. And in actual fact, 60% of the types of jobs that we have now didn't exist 70 years ago. Humans and people are constantly changing what they do and the skills they need and what they do to produce things. And I'm very confident that the same will happen with AI. And there's actually been many reports written—one, I think, by the World Economic Forum—and they did an analysis of where they think jobs are going and what skills will be needed. And they showed a massive uplift in the number of jobs that will be available in an AI world. And that's based off new types of jobs that are being created, new skills that are coming into existing jobs, and just the ability for people to create at a larger scale now.

Q: You said AI is an enabler, but how difficult is building in an AI era? Because every week you have some new startups, some exciting new product that's promising magic using AI and you have to compete with them really aggressively.

A: No, it's definitely an enabler. It enables smaller teams to build products faster, to explore more ideas, to get to code faster, to ship things to customers faster, and to ship it at a higher quality. We're seeing that for ourselves, operating as a tech company. And we're seeing uplifts across engineering, across design, across marketing, across customer happiness. It's just enabling so much more for us. I definitely view it as an enabler.

Q: Is that sustainable? Don’t tech companies lose their edge because everybody's innovating and now you don't have that exclusivity?

A: I think that's the eternal question around innovation. You always need to be staying on the front foot, staying on the cutting edge of things, and you can never rest. It's been the same for hundreds of years, and it'll be the same in the AI age. And we certainly treat innovation as a core skill of Canva. Having a great team who are constantly thinking about new ideas, looking at new technology, seeing how they can adapt it, and what skills they need to do their job is part of our culture. And we wouldn't have got where we are without maintaining that innovation and that ability to continue to accelerate as AI comes onto the scene.

Q: Are you also competing with AI because users can directly generate images on different AI platforms and all?.

A: I wouldn't call it a competition; I'd call it an opportunity. Just like any piece of technology, it enables more people to do something.

But us figuring out how we can best weave it into our product and enable people to use it through our product is a massive opportunity for us. And we view it as a continuation of our mission, which has been to empower the world to design for 13 years now. When we started empowering the world to design, it was all about mobile phones and browsers and websites.

And now a decade later, artificial intelligence has come on the scene. And it's still continuing to enable us to empower the world to design because we can bring design to more people. We can help them explore their ideas and express themselves.

And it's going to take our user base from the 220 million that we have now to over a billion. We're very confident that it'll be a tailwind for us, not a headwind.

Q: And what do you make of the Indian tech space and the startup space? What growth momentum do you see here?

A: India has been a fantastic market for us. It's recently gone from being the fifth biggest market in Canva to being the fourth biggest market for Canva. And being here on the ground and feeling the vibrancy of the people, the friendliness, and the skills that everyone has. I visited IIT Delhi yesterday and talking to some of the students and seeing the ideas that they're bringing, the startups that they're already founding. It's incredible. It's a really important market for us. And that's why we've invested in the team.

We've doubled the team in the last year and truly localising the product, getting the right content in there, getting the right product features. We've adapted our billing for the Indian market. I think it's an innovation that was developed here in India where you can now buy a one-day or a seven-day subscription to Canva to enable you to do that job in the moment. And it's gone really well. And it's that type of innovation in market that we really want to push forward.

Q: As these products keep getting more sophisticated and more refined, there's also a lot of risk and concern for deep fakes and AI generated images. What more needs to be done?

A: I think it's really important to think about that and tackle it head on. And we've actually got a world-leading trust and safety team that looks at all of our AI features. They battle test them, they make sure that bad stuff can't happen, both on the input side, so what people are putting in, and the output side, so what the AI actually outputs. And we make sure that it is as safe and trusted as it possibly can be. We've actually open-sourced a lot of the work that our trust and safety team do in order to enable others to have the same approach to AI safety as well.

Q: Major tech giants are also investing heavily in these design tools. Do you anticipate consolidation in the design tech space?

A: I don't think there’s any difference in the design tech space than other tech spaces. We're very keen to bring productivity and creativity together, and we've been doing that since Canva started. And we really created that category of visual communication and visual design for everyone. And the 220 million users that we have show that it is a really vibrant category, one that's growing incredibly fast. And we're also confident we can get to over a billion users. We foresee some really good growth for us, despite any of the kind of macro environment.

Q: Can you share financial performance for India and the overall global market that you're seeing for Canva?

A: We've seen incredible double-digit growth here in India just over the last year alone, as well as previous years. And Canva itself has over $2.5 billion in annual revenue now, and that continues to grow at double-digit growth as well. We're very confident that Canva can grow at the same rate that it has over previous years. And we're investing in the team here and also in the product with that mindset.

Q: The next big wave in tech often comes from unexpected places. What's the most exciting but underrated trend in design tech that you're probably keeping an eye on?

A: I think on the horizon, how AI agents interact with people and become part of your team is a really interesting thought bubble or experience that we need to build for. People at the moment use AI as quite a transactional thing, like you go and ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini a question and it gives something back. But behaving with it as if it were a team member and AI being able to go off and bring you back answers that you might not have been looking for that enable insight and innovation, I think will be a critical development over the next year and beyond.

Q: You initially started with a freemium segment. Now you've entered into enterprise solutions. What opportunity did you see there?

A: We still have a freemium product. It's an incredible growth driver for us because by empowering people to design, no matter what they want to do, whether they're creating a birthday card or a critical presentation that they have to deliver, we see it as part of our mission to bring it to as many people as possible. Freemium is still a model that we're fully behind and that's driven the growth in 220 million people using it. As we've seen people take Canva from being more of an individual pursuit into one that they actually use with their teams, that's opened up new opportunities for us.

That's why we launched Canva Enterprise last year, which was focused on really big teams - companies with a thousand or more employees, where you might have five thousand people using Canva simultaneously. And we wanted to build the right product for them and the right business model for them as well. We launched Canva Enterprise, which gives enterprises full control over Canva. They can hand out licenses to their different employees, they can set up their brand kits and their teams in a way that mirrors their structure and enables them to build multiple brands that they can deliver through everyone in the organisation, from marketers to sales people to even engineers who want to create visual content. That's an evolution in how Canva works and the type of business model that we have. But we still have freemium, we still have Canva Pro for small businesses and we still have Canva Teams for teams of 50 to 100 people.

Q: For any business for it to scale or evolve, does it definitely need to add the enterprise bit to the freemium model?

A: I think if you're looking at a market of having a billion people using your product, it needs to be very diversified and meet the needs of different segments of the market. When we're looking towards a billion people using Canva, that means it's mums and dads using it, that means it's small businesses around the corner using it, that also means it's Fortune 500 companies using it. And we're already seeing great signs of success in our enterprise rollout. We have 95 percent of the Fortune 500 that use Canva now, we have customers like Atlassian, HP, Snowflake, the New York Stock Exchange using Canva Enterprise. It's been going really well.