Canva, the Australian design startup, says its users have created 4.5 billion presentations and 1.4 billion documents on the platform, some of the first hard numbers on how the company’s push into productivity software is going. Users create nearly 3,000 presentations and 1,000 documents every minute, the company announced on Thursday.
The startup, best known for helping users create social media graphics, is trying to carve out space in a market long dominated by Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.
“Productivity and creativity have been separated for a long time, for no really good reason,” says Cameron Adams, Canva’s cofounder and chief product officer. Incumbent products are “a bit old-school,” he adds, arguing that they don’t match how people now produce strategy documents and pitch decks.
Still, Canva’s push into productivity software comes amid a delicate transition to offer more AI services. These new services, more popular than expected among Canva’s users, have driven up costs and forced the startup to cut its revenue growth forecast to 20%.
Canva debuted Visual Suite, its suite of productivity tools, in 2022, and overhauled it in April 2025 to add spreadsheets and coding tools. Docs is now the company’s third-most-popular design type, with adoption more than tripling in the past three years.
Mobile is becoming an increasingly important platform for Canva. More than half of Canva presentations created in Southeast Asia start on a phone, rising to three in five in the Philippines and nearly two in three in Indonesia.
Seventy-five percent of Indonesian users access Canva through a mobile device who notes that mobile-first markets in Asia and Africa see the phone as a productivity device far more than users in the U.S. or Europe might. “There are jobs that people skew more towards on mobile than they do on desktop,” he says. “We see a lot of people commenting on documents on mobile, so we privilege that sort of behavior on the mobile device.”
AI is making the phone a more credible work machine, allowing users to suggest changes verbally without needing to resort to a phone’s tiny keyboard. “Voice is a lot more usable in an AI format: I can quickly hit the microphone and spit out my thoughts. I don’t really have to structure it much,” Adams says.
That matters all the more in markets where many users are on weaker Android phones. “Performance becomes critical, particularly in Asia,” Adams says. “We’ve had a whole heap of engineers on that to make sure that Canva is a quick and stable experience when people use it on their phone.”
