Canva’s Obrecht says firm eyeing IPO in ‘next couple of years’

Canva, Australia’s most high profile startup, has had a surge in users of its new product suite as it builds toward listing as a public company, one of its founders said.

Affinity, a group of software design tools, racked up around two million downloads in the two weeks after Canva made it free. Users with a paid account can use artificial intelligence (AI) tools within the Affinity app.

“We’ve been blown away with the pickup so far,” Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s chief operating officer, said of the initial uptake of Affinity.

Closely held Canva, competing with firms such as Adobe, is betting on AI tools to drive the next wave of revenue growth and help the company gear up for an initial public offering.

“It’s probably imminent in the next couple of years, that’s for sure,” Obrecht said in the Bloomberg TV interview.

Canva was last valued around US$42 billion in a share sale. Co-founders Obrecht, Melanie Perkins, and Cameron Adams recently brought in former Zoom Video Communications CFO Kelly Steckelberg as a top financial executive.

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Obrecht said the company is stacked with a good balance of senior people with long tenures plus newer additions, like Steckelberg.

“Canva is one of the fastest-growing companies in the world right now, so that helps” retain and recruit top people, he said. “It’s a great product solving real problems for customers, delivering lots and lots of value. So people are excited” to work at the company. BLOOMBERG

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