Canva gets to $4B in revenue as LLM referral traffic rises

TechCrunch · Feb 18, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Creative company Canva ended 2025 on a high note with a 20% increase in monthly active users, growth that was partially propelled by adoption of its AI tools. Canva had more than 265 million monthly active users and over 31 million paid users in 2025, according to the company. That user base helped push its annual recurring revenue to $4 billion by the end of year, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch on the sidelines of Web Summit Qatar. The subscription-based company also saw its B2B business, which accounts for companies with more than 25 seats, grow by 100% with $500 million in ARR. The company still sees the majority of its business from North America, with continued growth in international markets. To increase paying users, Canva has introduced lower-priced subscriptions in countries like Pakistan, Uruguay, Morocco, and Jamaica. Canva’s AI investments are paying off, according to Obrecht. The company debuted a tool that lets users create mini apps and websites using AI last year. Obrecht noted the tool has more than 10 million monthly active users now. It’s been successful enough that the company is thinking about putting AI at the center and acting like a “design agency in your pocket,” Obrecht said. That shift to AI comes as Canva faces competition from the likes of Adobe, Freepik, and Apple, which has pushed to become a full-packaged creator suite by bundling apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStagewith into a $12.99 per month Creator Studio. “Where we started was… we got the Canva platform, and we’re giving the Canva platform a bunch of AI tools. We’re inverting that now. We’re becoming an AI platform with a bunch of design tools. So you can think of it more like a cursor for design,” he said. Canva is also actively integrating with chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. It said that by October 2025, users had more than 26 million conversations with the Canva app on ChatGPT. It also claimed that Canva was one of the top 10 referred domains from ChatGPT. Techcrunch event Boston, MA | June 23, 2026 Obrecht said that the company is allocating resources to work on having Canva surface in LLM search results, along with working on SEO. “So we drove a lot of early days in Canva through Google, really understood people’s search intent, and delivered them content that they could then go into our product and edit. And so we really see ChatGPT or any of the LLMs top of the funnel acquisition platforms,” he said. He noted that while search is a big driving factor, traffic through LLM referrals is in double-digit percentages. The company is also allocating resources to have Canva surface more in chatbots. Canva was last valued at $42 billion in a share sell. Obrecht told Bloomberg last November, that the company will go public in the next “couple of years.” Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. You can contact or verify outreach from Ivan by emailing im@ivanmehta.com or via encrypted message at ivan.42 on Signal. View Bio