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

Creative company Canva wrapped up 2025 with strong momentum, reporting a 20% rise in monthly active users — growth the company said was partly driven by increasing adoption of its AI-powered tools.

Canva ended 2025 with more than 265 million monthly active users and over 31 million paid users, according to the company. That expanding base helped lift Canva’s annual recurring revenue to $4 billion by the end of the year, co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht said on the sidelines of Web Summit Qatar. Canva also said its B2B segment — defined as businesses with more than 25 seats — doubled, reaching $500 million in ARR.

North America continues to account for most of Canva’s business, though the company said it is still seeing steady growth internationally. As part of its effort to convert more users into subscribers, Canva has rolled out lower-priced plans in markets including Pakistan, Uruguay, Morocco, and Jamaica.

Obrecht said Canva’s investments in AI are producing results. Last year, the company launched a tool that lets users build mini apps and websites with the help of AI. Obrecht said the feature now has more than 10 million monthly active users. The traction has been significant enough that Canva is considering placing AI at the centre of its product experience and positioning itself as a “design agency in your pocket,” he said.

The AI push comes as Canva faces continued competition from companies such as Adobe, Freepik, and Apple. Apple has been expanding its creator ambitions by bundling apps, including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage, 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,” Obrecht said.

Canva is also working to integrate more closely with chatbo, ts including ChatGPT and Claude. The company said that by October 2025, users had conducted more than 26 million conversations with the Canva app within ChatGPT. It also said Canva ranked among the top 10 domains referred to by ChatGPT.

Obrecht said Canva is dedicating resources to make sure the platform appears more often in LLM-powered search results, alongside its ongoing SEO efforts.

“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 added that while search remains a major traffic driver, referrals from LLMs now represent double-digit percentages of inbound traffic. Canva is also continuing to invest in improving how often it surfaces inside chatbots.

Canva was most recently valued at $42 billion in a share sale. Obrecht told Bloomberg last November that the company plans to go public within the next “couple of years.”