Back in 2019, Canva, the wildly successful design tool, introduced what the company was calling an enterprise product, but in reality it was more geared toward teams than fulfilling true enterprise requirements. On Thursday, the company changed that, announcing a new enterprise version that is truly geared toward the needs of larger organizations.
That includes the types of features that you would expect in this kind of product, including single sign-on, enhanced security offerings and tools for managing larger groups of users that IT would expect. It also offers centralized brand management and dedicated support.
Cam Adams, co-founder and CPO at the company, says in 2019, they were looking at moving from supporting mostly individual users to supporting small teams from between five and 100 users. Over the intervening years, they began seeing much larger organizations using Canva, and recognized that they needed a product more geared toward the requirements of these larger companies.
“We now have cohorts with up to 5,000 people using Canva inside an enterprise, and because of that, there’s a new type of Canva enterprise product that we’ve needed to ship to meet the needs of those larger groups. And that’s what we’ve actually done with Canva Enterprise,” Adams told TechCrunch.
This version is trying to address three specific problems Canva saw as it moved into larger organizations.
For starters, design isn’t confined to one group anymore. It spans multiple departments and industries. Secondly, there are myriad AI tools and Adams says he’s seeing CIOs becoming increasingly wary of “AI tool creep.” And finally, there is a workflow component. As more departments are involved in the design process, and as AI becomes more prominent, it requires a tool that can handle not just back-end user management, but also moving work across these different constituencies.
“We’re no longer just thinking about empowering every person. We’re really thinking about the second decade of Canva being about empowering every organization. And when we think of enterprises, we’re really looking at bringing all that fragmentation together into the one platform,” he said.
The prior version of the product is becoming a proper teams product and will cost $100 per seat per year with a three-person minimum. The enterprise pricing starts at $300 per seat per year, but with negotiated volume-based discounts available.
The Australian company was founded in 2012 and has raised more than $560 million, most recently at an astonishing $26 billion valuation, per the company. It boasts over 180 million monthly users worldwide.
