Canva boosts AI and workplace tools with Dream Lab and Visual Suite upgrades

Canva, the world’s all-in-one visual communication platform, has unveiled a suite of new products and features set to transform how people design at work and beyond. This announcement coincides with Canva reaching the major milestone of 200 million monthly active users, an increase of more than 115 million over the last two years, as the company also hits $2.5 billion in annualised revenue.

Canva’s latest innovations – including powerful new generative AI technology from Leonardo.ai, which was recently acquired by Canva – introduce exciting possibilities for smarter work, better collaboration, and stunning visual content creation. The launch of Dream Lab empowers teams across all industries and professions to unlock new levers of creativity, design precision, and efficiency in their work.

Dream Lab Canva

The company also shared that, five months since the introduction of Canva Enterprise – Canva’s subscription for large organisations – industry leaders like the NYSE, Atlassian, HP, Ray White, DHL Express, Tecnocasa, and Docusign have begun leveraging the offering to streamline their organisation’s content creation and scale their brand.

As Canva’s footprint expands across workplaces, the platform is experiencing explosive growth, with over 30 billion designs created to date – at a remarkable pace of more than 300 new designs every second. Users from more than 190 countries have also crafted more than 2.5 billion presentations and 500 million documents. Additionally, usage of Canva’s AI tools has skyrocketed, with over 10 billion uses to date.

“We’re incredibly excited to now be empowering more than 200 million people in nearly every country across the globe. From over 95% of the Fortune 500 to millions of small businesses, classrooms and nonprofits, it’s certainly an exciting milestone but we feel we’re still just 1% of the way there,” said Melanie Perkins, Canva’s Co-Founder and CEO, “As we double down on empowering everyone to turn their ideas into designs, we’re introducing dozens of new features across our Visual Suite at the intersection of creativity and productivity. From more interactive designs to a suite of AI-powered upgrades, we hope these new features help our community to continue achieving their goals.”

Introducing Dream Lab powered by Leonardo.Ai 

Only three months on from Canva’s acquisition of Leonardo.Ai, the company has introduced Dream Lab – a powerful generative AI tool designed to transform any idea from a simple text description into dynamic and highly dynamic photos and graphics. Powered by Leonardo’s advanced Phoenix foundational model, Dream Lab supercharges Canva’s AI image generation capabilities with tools that effortlessly turn a kernel of an idea into a spectacularly vibrant output in unprecedented ways.

This will include:

  • Generate multiple variations in more than 15 different styles including 3D Renders and illustrations
  • Use an existing image as a style reference to more precisely influence the output, unlocking possibilities like generating stock photos in your company’s style 
  • Create complex multi-subject images and photorealistic portraits

Canva joined forces with Leonardo.Ai to bring even more powerful AI capabilities to creative professionals. Millions of users, from content creators to professional designers, architects, and film directors, trust Leonardo.Ai for its quality and flexibility. Dream Lab enhances the precision of outputs from Canva’s user-friendly Magic Studio. At the same time, Canva is reaffirming its commitment to safe and responsible AI use by ensuring Dream Lab is backed by Canva Shield, the company’s rigorous and industry-leading approach to AI trust and safety.

By combining extensive image generation with Canva’s 100+ million content library, users have access to an endless supply of content, ensuring they always have the perfect image for any design. For example, art directors can generate entire storyboards, entrepreneurs can experiment with various product mockups, marketing teams can quickly create on-brand campaign assets, and educators can craft engaging learning materials – all with confidence and safety.

Unveiling dozens of new features across Canva’s Visual Suite

Since its debut, Canva’s Visual Suite, which includes docs, whiteboards, websites, presentations, and videos, has reimagined how teams collaborate and transformed content creation by consolidating every design capability and workplace tool into one seamless platform. In just two years since launching at Canva’s inaugural Canva Create event, the suite has reached several major milestones.

  • 2.5 billion presentations have been created; more than 1,500 every minute
  • 1.5 billion videos have been created; over 1,000 every minute
  • 500 million documents have been created; 650 every minute
  • Almost 80 million websites have been created; 50 every minute
  • 240 million whiteboards have been created; now the fastest growing product, with usage doubling this year

Canva is now unveiling a slew of new and forthcoming features based on the top requests from its community. From more interactivity to upgraded AI tools in docs, whiteboards and beyond, these enhancements are set to make work even more seamless:

  • Smarter whiteboards: AI-powered sorting and summarising, along with interactive ‘Reaction Stickies’ to help teammates vote on ideas in real-time.
  • More intuitive Magic Write: new AI functionalities including contextual text generation for more accurate output and one-click commands to refine generated text. 
  • Effortless video capabilities: advanced animation effects and automatically generated captions that can be matched to brand style to save hours of manual work. 
  • More interactive presentations: new interactive chart types and advanced animation effects to boost engagement. Plus, automatic page numbers added with one click.
  • Expanded data storytelling: the introduction of new chart types such as area charts, radar charts, hierarchy charts, and statistical charts.
  • Introducing custom mockups: turn photos into professional, on-brand mockup templates in a click.
  • Debuting polls and quizzes: create simple, customisable polls and quizzes directly in the editor. 
  • Powerful integrations: access and collaborate on Canva designs directly within Google Workspace via Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Docs and more.

Expanded content offering through more world-class assets  

Canva has rapidly expanded its content offering by integrating standout assets from creative powerhouses like Artlist and Pocstock. This expansion introduces a wide range of new templates, video assets, stock photography, and more, enabling the creation of premium, world-class content all in one place.

  • Artlist integration: through the Artlist Premium Video Library, Canva now offers music and cinematic video assets from top industry artists.
  • Enhancing inclusive representation with Pocstock: Canva strengthens its commitment to diversity by introducing the Pocstock content collection. This partnership gives paid users access to 150,000 photos, empowering them to create content that better reflects an inclusive world.

Work kits for even more audiences

Following the successful launch of Canva Work Kits in May, Canva is expanding its offerings to empower teachers, students, and small business owners with indispensable tools and resources tailored to their visual communication needs. The initial Work Kits, introduced for sales, marketing, HR, and creative industries, have been used over one million times globally.

  • Work Kits for small business owners: generalist Work Kits that include playbooks, customisable templates, organisational resources, and apps to support various aspects of running a business.
  • Work Kits for teachers: a wide range of education-focused templates and resources to address key challenges, refresh lesson plans, manage workloads, and encourage creativity based on real-world experiences.
  • Work Kits for students: templates, tips, and tools to enhance homework, organise studies, and elevate their presentations for extracurricular projects.

Canva is building a new generation of easy-to-use workplace software that serves all design and collaboration needs for professionals across industries. By continuously expanding and updating its Work Kits, Canva ensures its diverse community of users has a fast, easy, and free solution they need to achieve their goals.

Canva continues investment in the UK as company unveils first local brand campaign

Canva continues to strengthen its commitment to the UK market with the recent announcement of two new building acquisitions in Hoxton Square, tripling its London campus. Canva’s UK team has also doubled since marking its launch in 2023.

This expansion highlights the company’s growing presence in the region. In the UK, large organisations are increasingly adopting Canva to prioritise visual communication in their workflows. Over 145 million designs were made on Canva in the UK in the past year alone; with presentations marking as the platform’s most popular feature in the market, with over 32 million created in the past year.

In tandem with today’s announcement of new products and features, Canva has also launched its first UK brand campaign, ‘Design Against Dull,’ showcasing Canva’s increasing focus on the workplace – empowering people to transform the mundane into a more creative, fulfilling work experience through thoughtful design. The campaign underscores Canva's increasing integration into businesses of all sizes, as visual communication and collaborative tools become indispensable for today’s leaders.