‘We make complex things simple, and coding is next’: Canva’s Cliff Obrecht

Canva, a visual communication platform that still finds fragmented competition but no direct rival, is rapidly building on a foundation carefully curated over the past year. Artificial intelligence (AI) experiences and relevance for enterprises mark Canva’s duality in focus. This comes at a time when the competitive landscape doesn’t just include creative and workspace tools from the likes of Adobe, Google and Microsoft; but an increasing number of generative AI tools that rightly stake claim to creative prowess themselves. The Ghibli style smarts of the OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an example with image generation, while Google’s Gemini 2.5 stakes claim as the most proficient coding model.

In a conversation with HT, Cliff Obrecht, who is co-founder and chief operating officer of Canva, said this was possible due to the company’s three-pronged approach — one that features increasingly powerful open-source models which help in building their own omni-models (these are multimodal AI systems understanding relationships between text, images, audio, and video in a prompt), smart acquisitions such as Leonardo that unlocked a powerful image generational foundation model, and equally smart partnerships.

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Canva Code, a new product finding home in an increasingly more versatile suite, is the result of the latter. “We very much build our own models, but these models leverage some of the world’s best open-source models to essentially give it the world’s context and information, to bring out a fantastic design or image. When it comes to Canva Code, this is in partnership with Anthropic, something we’ve been very excited about,” explained Obrecht.

Code is one among a vibrant toolset unveiled at Canva Create 2025, the company’s annual conference.

Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet as well as other Claude models, are among the most refined AI models for coding tasks — they compete with Google Gemini 1.5 Pro, the new Gemini 2.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-4o. There are AI tools such as Cursor, Aider, Windsurf, which provide a choice of these models (among others), to coders. As the name suggests, Canva Code is trying to make it simpler and visually more intuitive for users to try their hand at building an app, with a text prompt explaining what they’d like it to do.

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Obrecht and I built an experimental app that compiled an exhaustive list of all cricket matches being played around the world on any particular date, with scores as well as details of the streaming platform or TV channels they’ll each be broadcast on for the India region. The results, which took around a minute and a half to process our prompt, were vividly detailed and impressive.

“We’re known for making complex things simple at Canva. Before Canva users had to go to Adobe or use Microsoft PowerPoint or Paint because there was no democratised design tool. We bridged that gap and enabled people that have an idea to turn it into an actual design. We want to create the same sort of output with code,” said Obrecht. He said Canva now has 230 million monthly active users.

“It’s still very daunting for people, but with this, we hope to give people confidence. A couple of years from now, we want people to say that of course they can create an app, that it’s as easy as typing a thought. We want to democratise coding,” he adds.

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Alongside, there is also a new Canva Sheets, which completes the text, presentations and spreadsheets troika alongside Canva Docs and Canva Presentations — in a way, this could mean a lot of workflows may move away from the likes of Google Docs and Zoom Docs, if adding visual assets and other text or data elements to a design, are required.

“The more we get into things like building applications, the more important the spreadsheet becomes. We really see it as a data layer that underpins the whole of Canva, because any form you have on a website or a rich media design, gets saved in Canva Sheets,” said Obrecht.

There is a data element to more additions too. Canva is adding to an all-in-one Visual Suite that promises to help create everything from documents, presentations to website designs within a unified tool — quite how well this fits different workflows, will differ across teams and use-cases. Magic Studio at Scale finds a building block in Canva Sheets, which the company envisions would become a solution for creating content across different formats, with particular focus on data.

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Magic Charts deliver just that mix of graphs, charts, dashboards or infographics. “This makes it easy for anyone to convert raw numbers into dynamic, on-brand visuals,” the pitch said. In 2022, Canva acquired a London-based data visualisation startup, Flourish, and that technology likely provides the foundation for the new features. Canva has drawn value from its smart acquisitions over the years, including Leonardo and Affinity in 2024; previously, Kaleido (2021), Smartmockups (2021), Pexels (2019) and Pixabay (2019), come to mind.

“We are pretty excited about the workflow benefits for companies and even students and classrooms around the world. This will completely transform the future of work and really streamline efficiencies,” said Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva.

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The Canva Photo Editor gets more AI-led point and click editing, generated backgrounds that contextualise lighting as well as improved object removal. These updates to the Canva suite come at a time when the company has sharpened focus on India, with significant localisation investments in the pipeline, marking the country’s ascendency as the fourth largest geographical demographic of active users.