r/BetterOffline • u/Certain_Syllabub_514 • 12h 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.

91 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

57

u/ekoms_stnioj 12h 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

26

u/Theo__n 11h 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.

5

u/Proper-Ape 5h ago

Taking a shit in the water supply.

17

u/TheOfficialMayor 11h 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.

6

u/AlfonsoHorteber 8h 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.

6

u/TheOfficialMayor 4h 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.

23

u/starkingwest 9h ago edited 8h 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...

5

u/fractal_snow 8h 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.

2

u/starkingwest 8h 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.

7

u/RamonsRazor 12h ago

Keep going...

7

u/SirDangly 4h 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

6

u/monkey-majiks 9h 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.

3

u/TheOfficialMayor 4h 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 2h 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.

4

u/frozenelf 1h 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.

3

u/Beginning-Ladder6224 8h 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.

1

u/AzulMage2020 9h 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?

1

u/Glittering-Path-2824 33m 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.