Canva’s productivity push is starting to gain traction—and in Southeast Asia, it’s happening on phones

Canva, the Australian design startup, says its users have created 4.5 billion presentations and 1.4 billion documents on the platform, some of the first hard numbers on how the company’s push into productivity software is going. Users create nearly 3,000 presentations and 1,000 documents every minute, the company announced on Thursday.

The startup, best known for helping users create social media graphics, is trying to carve out space in a market long dominated by Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. 

“Productivity and creativity have been separated for a long time, for no really good reason,” says Cameron Adams, Canva’s cofounder and chief product officer. Incumbent products are “a bit old-school,” he adds, arguing that they don’t match how people now produce strategy documents and pitch decks.

Still, Canva’s push into productivity software comes amid a delicate transition to offer more AI services. These new services, more popular than expected among Canva’s users, have driven up costs and forced the startup to cut its revenue growth forecast to 20%.

Canva debuted Visual Suite, its suite of productivity tools, in 2022, and overhauled it in April 2025 to add spreadsheets and coding tools. Docs is now the company’s third-most-popul...