Company: Canva
Title: Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer
Industry: Technology
Hometown:Â Perth, Australia
Notable in 2023: Added AI-powered tools to Canva's design platform as it competes head-on with Adobe, Google and Microsoft.
Online graphic design tool Canva has quickly become a leader in artificial intelligence, changing the way people create and share content online and on social media. The quick pivot is thanks to co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins, who embraced generative AI instead of being terrified by it.
"Our whole thing at Canva is to enable people to take their idea, turn [it] into a design and have no friction between those two points," Perkins said to El Pais. "That's been our mission for the last decade. Now we can take all these different things, integrate them into one platform and make it accessible to everyone. AI has been a really important part of that for us for many years."
When you don’t have any connections, you don’t have any network, you just kind of have to wedge your foot in the door and wiggle it all the way through.Melanie PerkinsCo-founder & Chief Executive Officer, Canva
Reaching over 160 million users monthly, Canva is weathering the ups and downs of the fast-growing AI industry including calls for regulation. Perkins told CNBC that despite challenges, the company has been profitable for the last six years. In June, it added a new London headquarters to expand its European presence, which houses 16% of its paid and free userbase. It's also partnering with industry leaders like OpenAI to expand on the text-based front.
"Our ambition with Canva is to empower the whole world to design," Perkins told The Information. "But we quite literally mean that — we want to empower every single person to design anything they can possibly imagine in every language on every device."
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