Canva earns $4B in revenue as LLM referral traffic rises

Creative company Canva ended 2025 on a high note with a 20% increase in monthly active users, growth driven in part by the adoption of its AI tools.

Canva had more than 265 million monthly active users and more than 31 million paid users in 2025, according to the company. This user base helped push its annual recurring revenue to $4 billion by the end of the year, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch on the sidelines of Web Summit Qatar. The subscription-based company also saw its business-to-business (B2B) business, which represents companies with more than 25 seats, grow 100% with $500 million in ARR.

The company continues to focus the majority of its business in North America, with continued growth in international markets. To increase the number of paying users, Canva has introduced low-priced subscriptions in countries like Pakistan, Uruguay, Morocco, and Jamaica.

Canvas Artificial intelligence investments It’s paying off, according to Obrecht. The company first launched a tool that allows users to create… Widgets and websites using AI last year. Obrecht noted that the tool now has more than 10 million monthly active users. It’s been successful enough that the company is considering putting AI at the center and acting like “a design agency in your pocket,” Obrecht said.

This shift to AI comes as Canva faces competition from the likes of Adobe, Freepik and Apple, which has sought to become a leader in the AI ​​space. The complete package creator suite By bundling apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage with Creator Studio for $12.99 per month.

“Where we started…we got Canva, and we’re giving Canva a set of AI tools. And we’re reversing that now. We’ve become an AI platform with a set of design tools. So you can think of it like a design indicator.”

Canva also actively integrates with chatbots like ChatGPT and Cloude. By October 2025, users had more than 26 million conversations with the Canva app on ChatGPT, it said. It also claimed that Canva was one of the top 10 referred domains by ChatGPT.

Obrecht said the company is dedicating resources to working on getting Canva to appear in LLM search results, along with working on search engine optimization.

“So, we drove a lot in the early days at Canva through Google, really understanding people’s search intent, and giving them content that they can then go into our product and edit. And so we’re already seeing ChatGPT or any of the LLMs leading the way in the acquisition platforms.”

He noted that although search is a big driving factor, traffic through LLM referrals is in the double-digit percentages. The company is also devoting resources to making Canva appear more prominent in chatbots.

Canva was last valued at $42 billion in a stock sale. Obrecht said Bloomberg Last November, the company will go public within the next “two years.”