Australian tech giant Canva has been fined nearly $800,000 by the corporate regulator after filing financial reports almost a year late.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) on Wednesday announced it had issued fines totalling $792,000 to four companies within the Canva Group after they failed to file financial reports for the 2024 financial year by the required date.

Canva, Canva Operations, Canva Trading and Fusion Books will each pay an infringement notice of $198,000 for not lodging the reports by the end of April last year.

The required financial reports were filed in late March this year, nearly a year after the deadline.

The payment of these fines is not an admission of guilt or liability by Canva and does not mean it has been convicted of the alleged offence.

Under Australian law, large proprietary companies must prepare and lodge annual financial reports by certain dates.

To be counted as a large company, a firm must meet two of these three requirements: consolidated revenue of $50 million or more, consolidated gross assets of the company and entities of $25 million or more, and 100 or more employees.

A spokesperson for Canva said the company is now up-to-date on its financial filings.

“We take our reporting obligations seriously and regularly share public updates on our business and growth,” the spokesperson said.

“As we’ve grown and scaled, we’ve strengthened our reporting systems…and have strong processes in place to maintain this going forward.”

Restructuring

Canva now has 265 million monthly users, 31 million paying users and annualised revenue of $5.5 billion ($US4 billion).

The ASIC fines amount to just over 0.01 per cent of Canva’s annualised revenue.

ASIC confirmed that Canva Group had undergone a corporate restructure in late 2024, and that reports through Canva Australia Holdings for the 2025 financial year have been lodged on time.

It was also announced this week that long-time Canva chief technology officer Brendan Humphreys had stood down after 12 years at the company, with a ‘head of technology’ role to be created instead.

Canva is looking to become a publicly listed company next year, after its plans were delayed due to a major restructure around artificial intelligence.

The company is currently switching from one based on software-as-a-service to one focusing on AI credits.

In an interview with Capital Brief in April, Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht said the company was ready to go with the initial public offering (IPO) and that he expected it to happen next year.

An AI pivot

Last month the company announced ‘Canva 2.0’, which will see it transforming into a “conversational, agentic platform where teams can go from the spark of an idea to complete, published work in one place”.

This platform will be powered by a foundational model that the company said is built to understand the “structure, hierarchy and complexity of real-world design” and can create fully layered, editable output from a single prompt.

Canva has also made a number of AI-focused acquisitions of late.

Earlier this year, the company bought Australian AI tool Simtheory and marketing automation company Ortto, which were both founded by Sydney brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey.

The acquisitions would transform Canva from a design tool to an “end-to-end” work system, the company said.

Canva has focused heavily on the integration of AI in recent years.

Last year the company announced it was readying to introduce AI agents on the platform which would carry out tasks in design, marketing and sales.

Earlier this year, 10 of the 12-person technical writing team were laid off by Canva, but the company said that this was not due to the wider AI push.