Canva has unveiled a new suite of products which will directly compete with the likes of Microsoft and Google as part of the Aussie tech giant’s ambitious plan to be “one of the world’s most valuable companies”.
Canva on Wednesday announced its new Visual Worksuite, a collaboration of new products targeting large workplaces, offering an “end-to-end visual communication platform”.
Included in the new products is a document and presentation editor that will directly compete with Google Docs and Microsoft’s PowerPoint, and video editing software.
The products were unveiled at the inaugural Canva Create event in Sydney this week, with the company marking more than 85 million users around the world, who are making more than 180 designs every second.
The homegrown tech firm has illustrious goals to be much more than a simple editing tool, with a significant expansion targeting workplace customers.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins said her aim is for it to be “one of the world’s most valuable companies”.
“It has been incredible to see the continued growth of Canva over the last few years, as more and more people embrace the power of visual communication to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals,” Perkins said.
“With the launch of our new Visual Worksuite, we’re bringing simple design products to the workplace to empower every employee, at every organisation, and on every device. Visual communication is becoming an increasingly critical skill for teams of every size across almost every industry.”
The centrepiece of the announcement is the launch of Canva Docs, a new collaborative document editing tool that the company said will “build on the best document editors that came before” – think Google Docs – and also adds a range of new functionality focusing on visuals, graphics and presentations.
“Documents are fundamental to how we communicate, and yet the way we design them hasn’t evolved in years,” Canva Group Lead for Editing Kurt Lash said in a blog post.
“With traditional document editors, adding rich graphical elements isn’t always a seamless experience – and because they’re designed with printers in mind, their formats are static. But your documents can be beautiful as well as functional.
“To stand out and make an impression in a world that’s gone visual, you need to create documents that are visually stunning, engaging and impactful.”
Canva Docs will combine text, media and data visualisations into a document editing platform, with connections to the company’s other products and its content library of more than 100 million design assets.
“Imagine building a project plan that includes the whiteboard your team brainstormed on, the presentation you used for the kickoff meeting, and the social assets or videos you plan to use – all in one place,” Lash said.
Canva Docs also includes a “convert to presentation” button, which will turn the document into a “beautiful presentation with just one click”, putting the product in direct competition with PowerPoint.
Canva Docs will officially launch later this year, but you can apply for beta access now.
The company has also unveiled Canva Website, a tool to create one-page websites such as landing pages, product factsheets, event announcements and portfolios.
One of Canva’s most popular tools is its one-click background remover for photos, which it said has been used 930 million times. Users will soon be able to use this tool on videos as part of the Canva video suite, the company announced this week.
Canva also said that its long-term aim of being a visual communication suite for teams is gaining a head of steam, with more than 4 million paid seats in Canva for Teams, a jump of more than 240 per cent in the last year.
Canva has enjoyed rapid growth recently, doubling its staff numbers in the last year and hitting a valuation of $32 billion in August.