NEW DELHI: Canva – one of the world’s top graphic design software companies and a key competitor to Adobe – saw as many as 5.3 lakh presentations being made daily in India just in 2024. The usage was equally big when it came to making resumes, social media posts, or even pitch decks.
Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of Canva, says India will be a critical factor as the Australian company – last valued at around $32 billion – looks to move towards its goal of hitting one billion global users. “India will play a critical role in us getting to a billion users,” Adams told TOI in an interview. Excerpts:
Can you tell us about the journey of Canva so far?
We started in 2012 in Sydney and released our first product the next year, with an idea of empowering the world to design. We realised that design was a superpower that you could give to people that enabled them to do things they couldn’t dream of before. It started off slowly and took us a while to build momentum. It grew and grew and grew and we signed up a million people in the first 18 months, and now are at 220 million users that use our product across the world.
How big is the Indian market for you, and what is the adoption of Canva here?
India is one of our most critical markets. It’s recently gone from being our fifth most popular market to being the fourth most popular. It’s rising up through the ranks and even growing faster than a lot of the world. That’s why we’ve been keen to invest in India over the last few years. The investment that we put into the team and products here pays dividends.
The draft rules for digital personal data protection law say that govt can put restrictions on transfer of certain class of personal data outside India. Does this concern you?
It doesn’t particularly concern me about India because this is a pattern that we’re seeing around the world. You’re increasingly seeing countries and regions like Europe bringing in their own data protection laws and requiring data sovereignty. So, creating the systems where we can do that globally is actually a focus of one of our teams. I don’t think it’s a problem in India, specifically because once we’ve got the right infrastructure that we can spin up, we can do that fairly easily across regions.
Will you look at storing data on local servers here?
We’re definitely looking at the infrastructure mechanisms by how we do that, like how we structure our code, how we have our service set up, how we replicate data across regions, etc. Our engineering teams are looking into it… I can’t say specifically about India right now, but we’re definitely looking at systems that enable that in different regions around.
