Adobe Challenger Bets Economic Downturn Will Propel Sales

Founded in 2012, Canva grew rapidly by allowing schools and nonprofit organizations to use its entire product suite free. Now, more than 100 million people worldwide use its online platform each month to create anything from corporate presentations to children’s party invitations. About 10% of users pay for additional functions, including the ability to work in teams.

Canva executives say that annual revenue exceeds $1 billion and the company has been profitable since 2017. A 2021 funding round valued Canva at about $40 billion, and its investors include

Walt Disney Co.

Chief Executive

Bob Iger

and Australia’s

Blackbird

Ventures, which counts

Tesla Inc.

Chair

Robyn Denholm

as a partner.

Silicon Valley has been aggressively reducing expenses in response to slower growth.

Amazon.com Inc.’s

chief executive this month said layoffs are under way at the tech giant and will extend into next year.

Meta Platforms Inc.

is cutting more than 11,000 workers, or 13% of staff, and companies including Twitter Inc., Stripe Inc., and

Lyft Inc.

have announced job cuts.

Tech Layoff by the Numbers

Canva executives say their strategy pairs well with a gloomier economic outlook.

Canva didn’t raise prices when incorporating its existing design platform into a new worksuite of products including tools for website design, presentations and printing. As a starting point, businesses pay $150 annually for up to five users to use the premium version. According to Canva executives, the idea is to provide a cheaper and more intuitive alternative to other enterprise products, including those offered by Adobe and

Microsoft Corp.

The worksuite launched in September.

“Regardless of the choppy seas, we’re in a very fortunate position because we’re profitable, because we’re a company that companies are turning to in an economic downturn,”

Melanie Perkins,

who founded Canva with

Cliff Obrecht

and

Cameron Adams,

said in an interview. “We don’t need to be worried too much about the external noise.”

Mr. Adams said Canva has around $700 million in cash from funding rounds that is largely untouched.

Still, Canva is pitching new products when many tech firms are finding it hard to persuade customers to pay for existing services.

This month, shares of U.S.-listed software firms

Cloudflare Inc.

and

Atlassian Corp.

—both of which give customers a limited free version of their product to entice them to upgrade to a paid version with more functions—had their worst week ever as investors worried about their subscription numbers. Cloudflare said customers have downgraded to its free product over its past two fiscal quarters, while Atlassian said customers were converting to paid subscriptions at a slower pace.

“You’re seeing some companies do layoffs or, at a minimum, not expand their seats,” said Cloudflare Chief Executive

Matthew Prince

on a Nov. 3 analyst call.

Canva remains a relatively small player, its revenue dwarfed by the $15.8 billion generated by Adobe. Such scale gives Adobe the firepower to fight back. In December 2021, Nasdaq-listed Adobe relaunched its own freemium visual-design tool, targeting what it sees as the same light-needs audience as Canva at a similar price. Executives say the Adobe Express platform has attracted 20 million new sign-ups since then. In September, it agreed to buy collaborative design startup Figma for $20 billion.

“Adobe let Canva get away from it. The company seems determined not to make the same mistake with Figma,” JPM Securities analysts said in a September note.

Ms. Perkins conceived the idea that would become Canva after trying to teach fellow university students in Australia’s far west how to use multiple design platforms.

In 2007, Ms. Perkins and Mr. Obrecht—who married in 2021—created a school yearbook design tool that within five years became Australia’s largest yearbook company. They subsequently created Canva as a design platform open to anyone capable of using a web browser or smartphone. Users have created more than 13 billion items including presentations, photo collages, business cards, logos and social-media posts, drawing on Canva’s templates and a library of millions of images, videos, tables and other items.

Canva’s core concept is that communication shaped by remote working, global collaboration and online interaction is best done visually. People have posted images and videos on social media for years, and those storytelling skills are now common in the workplace, Mr. Adams said. Canva said it had 55,000 paying teams among organizations with at least 500 employees before its September product launch.

Still, the pullback by tech stocks has hurt Canva’s valuation. Blackbird Ventures, which owns 15% of Canva, recently reduced its valuation of the company’s total equity to $26 billion.

Blackbird’s Ms. Denholm said privately held companies should tread carefully given the economic uncertainty. “The message at this point in time is to look at your business model and make sure that you’re making the funding last as long as you can, particularly for later-stage companies,” Ms. Denholm said.

So far, Canva hasn’t shown any sign of waning confidence. At the Sydney launch of its enterprise product in September, Mr. Obrecht wore sneakers with illuminated, flashing soles while he and Canva’s other co-founders pressed oversize buttons on stage to launch outsize confetti, drumroll and mic-drop animations on a giant screen behind them.

Canva said its growth strategy within the enterprise market is showing early signs of success, with several large U.S. companies signing up as customers. The company said its whiteboard product—essentially a limitless blank space on which multiple users can share and develop ideas or plans in various formats—had 10 million users less than eight weeks after its September launch.

“It’s quite literally the fastest-growing thing we’ve ever launched,” said Mr. Adams, a former Google designer who joined as Canva’s chief product officer following an introduction by Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen.

Nasdaq-listed

HubSpot Inc.

accounts for more than 1,000 of Canva’s enterprise users after the marketing software firm switched from programs including Adobe Photoshop. Using visuals rather than text means material doesn’t have to be translated for use in different countries, said Kat Warboys, HubSpot’s marketing director. HubSpot’s job ads list Canva proficiency among its desired skills.

“You either add headcount, so you’re just going to keep continuing to add designers, or you can potentially find a better way to scale. We chose that latter option and Canva has really been the enabler of that,” Ms. Warboys said.

Write to Stuart Condie at stuart.condie@wsj.com