Canva, a global design giant valued at more than US$45 billion, is experiencing a moment of strategic transformation in Brazil, its second largest market in the world.
During the Web Summit, the company’s country manager in Brazil, Alberto Ceresa, explained that the company is no longer seen just as a design tool to position itself as an artificial intelligence platform, seeking to unify the creative workflow of micro-entrepreneurs and students in a single environment.
To consolidate this new phase, the Brazilian operation, which now has a local leadership structure and team expansion, has invested in “Social First” campaigns with iconic figures from the popular imagination, such as Agostinho Carrara. In addition to marketing, education appears as a central pillar, with the free offer of Canva Pro to institutions and students, reinforcing the brand’s commitment to the democratization of design and organic growth in the country. Read excerpts from the interview below.
Study abroad
Upgrade your career!
IM: How important is Brazil to Canva?
Alberto Ceresa: Brazil is Canva’s second largest market in the world. We have around 150 people working here. We decided to make an investment to strengthen our presence, which had already existed for 10 years, but was more superficial. Now, with the creation of the position of president and the expansion of the team, we focus on solidifying the foundation for a second phase of growth, with a special focus on education.
IM: What future do you plan for Canva and Brazil in the coming years?
AC: My goal is ambitious: today, we have one in every eight or nine people using Canva in Brazil. I want to reach one in two people. We have the same potential that Google had in its growth trajectory. I believe we can reach this level of penetration, maintaining our solid and accessible business model, while investing heavily in technology and AI.
IM: Your growth objective in Brazil also involves increasing the local team and providing a larger space for the company, correct?
AC: Yes. We are setting up our own office at the intersection of Avenida Faria Lima and Avenida Juscelino Kubistchek. The goal is to have a space with the Canva culture, where all the creative and strategic part is done internally by our talented team, which has already won international marketing awards.
Continues after advertising
InfoMoney: Canva has a very bold marketing strategy to highlight its brand creation and editing tool. It has already campaigned with Xuxa to present the fictional ‘Xuxa Só para Adultinhos’. He also falsely launched a Gracyanne Barbosa brand of eggs. More recently, the star was the character Agostinho Carrara, from the series A Grande Família on TV Globo, creating his own confection. All campaigns received a lot of support from the public. Is the strategy unique to Brazil or is it part of a company communication movement around the world?
AC: Canva is divided at a local level and each region has independence. The “Social First” strategy is made here in Brazil. We don’t invent characters; we leverage stories that already exist, as we did with Xuxa, Gracyanne Barbosa and, more recently, Agostinho Carrara. We connected Canva to these conversations organically and the result was a success, including a video lasting more than four minutes that had a high retention rate.
IM: And in Brazil, what is your user profile?
Continues after advertising
AC: We have many micro-entrepreneurs. Small businesses represent more than 90% of open companies and are responsible for more than 25% of the national GDP. It’s a giant market that has evolved a lot.
Canva too. Years ago, it was a simple design app. We’ve made two big changes over the years. The first was to move from a design platform to productivity, with the launch of functions such as spreadsheets and documents. The second big change was this year: now, we position ourselves as an Artificial Intelligence platform that works with design. We’ve made a lot of investments, worth billions of dollars, into servers and AI. This has led us to be the third company in the world in using AI, after only ChatGPT and Gemini.
“Canva is now the third most used AI platform in the world, behind only ChatGPT and Gemini”
IM: Canva, then, now positions itself as an artificial intelligence company, fighting with the giants in the sector?
Continues after advertising
AC: We launched this new visual structure in April, so it’s very recent. We are starting to see this impact now. Canva is today the third most used AI platform in the world, behind only ChatGPT and Gemini. Our goal is to solve workflow fragmentation: the user creates, edits and publishes everything in one place, without having to switch between multiple tools.
IM: Does your profitability continue via subscription?
AC: Yes. As a company philosophy, we have the freemium product, which is already very solid. And we have subscriptions for customers and the enterprise model. We will not have any other type of profitability. We also offer free subscriptions to students and teachers as part of our education pillar.
Continues after advertising
IM: Subscription prices are below other AI platforms. Today, the most robust plan costs around R$50, while LLM platforms usually charge around R$100. As there is a high investment in technology and change in brand positioning, are there plans to increase prices for Canva subscriptions?
AC: There may be an adjustment in the future, even due to the cost of annual inflation. But these are market issues that happen with any product. I can’t guarantee it will increase or not. But, of course, there is an effort to ensure that prices are always in line with what the public can pay.
Our advantage over other AI companies is that none of them are profitable today. This is our competitive advantage.
