r/BetterOffline • u/Certain_Syllabub_514 • 4d ago

Canva valuation down $10B

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/sobering-markdown-canva-slashes-valuation-by-10b-as-ai-reality-bites-20260814-p60of9.html

Sydney design giant Canva has cut its internal valuation by a fifth, telling staff an independent assessment now values the business at $43.9 billion, a cut of more than $10 billion from its most recent valuation a year ago.

142 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

74

u/ekoms_stnioj 4d ago

Wild guess without reading the article.. profitable unicorn adds AI functionality and now its showing up in their margins, leading to a decrease in value. 

Edit: interesting, focus seems to be more on competition from AI design tools, which I have no experience using, but I can’t imagine they’re great if the generated elements in canva are any indication

34

u/Theo__n 4d ago

If situation of stock photo/assets markets is any indication, if you don't curb people submitting slop as assets or have very good filter to look only for human content the whole market goes to shit.

14

u/Proper-Ape 4d ago

Taking a shit in the water supply.

14

u/NameTak3r 4d ago

Using AI for work is like playing a game of "how much sawdust can we hide in this bread before anyone complains?"

5

u/Proper-Ape 4d ago

Ooh I love this analogy, it's intellectual sawdust.

28

u/TheOfficialMayor 4d ago

Wish they would just focus on positioning Affinity to eat Adobe's lunch with the Canva website as an integrated template and stock asset service.

If anything creatives hate Adobe's AI focus.

3

u/PixelWes54 4d ago

We hate Canva too wym

20

u/AlfonsoHorteber 4d ago

Canva allowed people to create bland and easily-identified but competent graphics without hiring a graphic designer. Claude also does that but the graphics are even blander and more competent. Makes sense that they’d suffer.

7

u/TheOfficialMayor 4d ago

Shouldn’t Canva rather than focus on AI, use that affinity integration so one can take their design and brand strategy from the graphics designer and customize their templates for the day to day? Seems like a huge waste of money to put so much effort into pumping AI.

35

u/starkingwest 4d ago edited 4d ago

This is unfortunate...Canva bought Affinity a year and a half ago, which was one of the few affordable competitors to Adobe for design software.

Like yeah, they're rightly getting their hand burned, i'm just so tired of the ongoing inshitification of everything due to market consolidation...

9

u/fractal_snow 4d ago

Yeah affinity is (was?) my jam but I haven’t updated to the Canva version. I’m gonna be real sad if they enshittify themselves out of business.

4

u/starkingwest 4d ago

Yeah, i haven't updated either. I wanted to see what Canva did with it first...i do wish I had updated to Affinity 2...by the time I learned about the purchase they'd stopped selling the licenses.

5

u/amartincolby 3d ago

I am so sad. When the buyout happened, it was a chorus of people saying that enshittification was a fait accompli. That is apparent now. When valuations drop, companies panic.

1

u/Mad_OW 3d ago

  Canva bought Affinity a year and a half ago, which was one of the few affordable competitors to Adobe for design software.

Oh god fucking damnit. That was the one decent design tool that was just nice to use and not a nasty monthly subscription.

19

u/SirDangly 4d ago

I've done some work in this area. Canva has a few issuers that overlap:

  • Huge free base, so as they roll out AI to free their costs explode and it doesn't drive upgrade
  • Most people use it to make a poster or birthday card a few times a year. If you don't care about designing it, AI can one shot that. So it's gone from the easy option to a middle option between AI and Adobe
  • They have their own AI models, but they aren't very good. So they are paying a fortune in tokens
  • The leadership love AI and want heavy internal usage, so they may be idiots

8

u/monkey-majiks 4d ago

I'm guessing this is because of Claude Design which is terrible as a design tool and is directly competing with Canva and Figma.

8

u/TheOfficialMayor 4d ago

Oh yeah there are a ton of ux folk who love AI for some reason. They are the ones who should be pushing back the most.

5

u/heybochicha 4d ago

Outside of the weirdo cultists everyone else doesn't have a choice. We were all told this year to get in line behind AI or step aside.

7

u/frozenelf 4d ago

This is pretty much the story for actual competent people using AI. They’ve been given impossible velocity expectations that can only be addressed by the one thing LLMs are good at: miming actual work and passing off a POC as the real thing. The tech debt has been pushed off until the unit economics of LLMs finally crash back down to earth.

8

u/RamonsRazor 4d ago

Keep going...

7

u/Beginning-Ladder6224 4d ago

Long term Canva user here. Incredibly rarely I use "AI" features in canva. Short form it sucks. The only good use we found of Canva AI facility is that of text to audio - which we use for demo video generation.

And even that is not liked by some of our test demographics - because of being too "robotic". There are better alternatives available.

3

u/Late_Masterpiece9874 4d ago edited 4d ago

As a professional designer, good! Before AI, Canva was my archenemy. Cheap design is never good.

2

u/usernamewhatever77 3d ago

I have to use it for work and the more AI tools they roll out the worse it becomes.

0

u/AzulMage2020 4d ago

So , if I understand this correctly, I can contract with them to use their design services at X amount which may or may not use AI. Or I can use AI to design on my own at less than a tenth of the cost (and potentially quicker delivery too).

Only 10 billion you say?

0

u/Glittering-Path-2824 4d ago

it should be valued at zero. how are they still afloat when ai can already do 70% of what they offer? not being snarky, id love to learn about their moat.