Canva’s smart acquisitions are fueling its latest chapter of growth

LOS ANGELES: It was back in March when Canva, the wildly popular AI-powered visual communication platform, announced that it was acquiring Affinity, a professional creative software suite. This was always going to be a significant step for the platform as it builds its competition with tech giants like Adobe, Google and Microsoft, expanding functionality piece by piece. Currently, its arsenal includes three applications from British company Serif, which the company says are the basis for transforming Canva into a “comprehensive solution for all designers, including professional graphic designers, illustrators and typographers.”

At Canva Create 2024, Affinity announced the new version 2.5, which includes new advanced editing options that further expand the possibilities for “professional” editing performance. Updates include support for variable fonts, which opens up a new world of typographic design possibilities for designers, and the addition of a stroke width tool that allows you to edit the pressure profile of any curve in your document.

Serif has developed three applications, namely Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and Affinity Publisher 2, as cross-platform and available on Apple iPad, Apple Mac as well as Microsoft Windows computing devices. The Affinity app is used by over 3 million users, most of whom are creative professionals.

Affinity Apps now also supports ARM64 chips, which means they are already optimized for upcoming Windows PCs, which will increasingly support new chip architectures trying to strike a balance between performance and power savings. Chipmakers supplying silicon for Microsoft’s Windows PC ecosystem are trying to find an answer to the jumps in performance and battery life that Apple Silicon for Macs has seen over the past few years.

“Affinity is undoubtedly the fastest creative suite on the market. The team did an amazing job building an architecture that truly cannot be compared,” says Adams. “Being able to zoom in on an illustration by 50 million percent without noticing any slowdown is just amazing,” says Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer at Canva.

The question, of course, remains whether Affinity will compete with Adobe’s equally popular tools, and whether this acquisition means Affinity will be integrated into the Canva suite. The company is aware of the existence of a strong community of Affinity users who have helped shape the application over the years. For now, Canva and Affinity will exist as separate apps and platforms.

“We truly believe that designers deserve alternatives, designers deserve really fast tools, and designers deserve a company that listens to their needs,” says Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva.

This summer is expected to see significant growth in Windows PCs with ARM architecture, led by the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips. Canva confirms that Affinity is the first creative software with comprehensive, native ARM support, which will give it an advantage in adopting the new chip standard in the PC ecosystem.

Creating a solid foundation

“Pro” tools are important, and Affinity caters to this exact user demographic on Canva – Affinity’s areas of focus are professional photo editing, illustration, graphic design, and page layout. Canva already has a user base of 180 million.

Perhaps it is important to illustrate Canva’s precise accuracy in identifying ideal acquisitions in Europe for its model and business plan. Although they only opened the doors to their London headquarters in 2023, Flourish (2022), Kaleido (2021), Smartmockups (2021), Pexels (2019) and Pixabay (2019) are already part of the Canva family. They identified the talent, diversity of tools and values ​​in this part of the world.

These acquisitions complement Canva’s internal efforts to develop and refine AI models, as well as its partnership with AI giant OpenAI. “We were one of the first companies to write GPT for our ChatGPT program, and we are at the forefront of most GPT use cases,” says Adams. However, the core of the modern Canva service – functionality like Magic Design and the new Magic Video editing suite, which includes a new background voice removal feature – use models developed by Canva engineers.

Canva is also inviting schools and nonprofits to join its waitlist to gain free access to Affinity. They claim that Canva is already available for free to schools and nonprofits around the world, so much so that over 60 million students and teachers use it in many countries. That’s before we add the 600,000 charities and registered not-for-profits that have similar access. “Free licenses will be made available to those on the waiting list in the coming months,” the company said in a statement.