Canva’s five-year snakes and ladders valuation game has taken another major slide, with both investors and the company itself wiping billions from its worth, just a year after it peaked at US$42 billion (A$65B at the time).
Two of Canva’s earliest and largest local backers, Blackbird and Airtree recently ran the ruler over the design platform once again, with external valuers marking it down 17% to US$34.9B (c. A$49B).
Blackbird partner Rick Baker said the VCs updated fund valuations were sent to investors today and they remain bullish on the company as it pivots to the AI era.
“We back Canva’s judgment to think long term. They’ve now managed to bring down costs of serving AI by 90% and this will unlock the ability to deliver AI at real scale with unit economics that actually stack up,” Baker said.
“The Canva AI product is looking great and early signs from users are strong, and that gives me a lot of optimism in what’s next.”
But their valuation is perhaps on the generous side, with the AFR first reporting that private-share broker Hiive was offering Canva stock on the secondary market at an implied valuation of about US$30bn, a 29% discount.
And Capital Brief revealed Canva was also hard on itself when it came to its annual employee shares issue, with an independent valuation lopping off around 20%, to US$31bn (A$43.5bn), down from US$38.9bn a year ago.
That’s a drop of more than A$11 billion.
Of course that figure, done to comply with US tax law before more than 5000 employees receive shares, is generally priced under the general investor level, but in the context of Australia’s changing capital gains tax rules, it could also leave employees with a higher tax bill if or when the share price recovers.
IPO rethink?
However, the dramatic drop could also see the touted 2027 US public float delayed until Canva swings back in favour with investors and the valuation climbs once again.
In part, that will depend on whether there’s an uptick in growth after CEO and cofounder Melanie Perkins recently told investors they’d cut Canva’s forecast revenue growth from 30% to 20%, after they delayed the release of new products to tackle escalating AI costs.
Perkins said it was a “deliberate decision to get the economics right” in her Q2 CY26 update to shareholders, because “average cost of serving an AI task was too high” and the design platform was “relying too heavily on frontier models”.
“We decided to slow the rollout while we rebuilt the architecture, reduced unit costs and strengthened the business model,” she wrote.
“This slowed our distribution and impacted our near-term growth, but it also enabled some of the most important technical advances in Canva’s history and put us in a much stronger position to scale AI sustainably.”
Rival comparisons
Canva’s not the only software platform seeking to reposition as an AI company amid plunging market confidence.
Listed rival Figma saw its share price plunge more than 70% from post-IPO highs, while Adobe was also heavily marked down heavily – a case of falling tides sinking all boats, since Canva’s US$42 bn 2025 price tag was in part tied to the worth of its competitors.
Of course, the changes have led to speculation that the ship may have sailed for Canva’s Nasdaq listing at a peak.
Perhaps the most savage blow came from the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings on the weekend, with guest Jason Lemkin, a leading SaaS investor, describing Canva’s situation as “depressing”, with AI “maiming” the business.
Canva appeared to have “defied gravity”, Lemkin said, “but it doesn’t look like it”.
“Canva was a no code way to design stuff – it was a breathtakingly disruptive product,” he added, but now AI agents “just routed us around Canva”.
The killer blow was Stebbings pointing out that a lot of LPs listen to his show and have Canva in their portfolios.
“What do you think it’s worth? I’d say it’s probably worth 12 billion (c. A$17bn) right now. 20% growth at 4 billion ARR in the current public markets and … decelerating,” Lemkin replied.
Fellow guest Rory O’Driscoll from Scale Venture previously pointed out that Adobe, growing at 12%, trades at 3-4x revenue, which gives the US$12bn price tag a logic.
His take was that if the existential risk from AI is there, it could be less than $12bn, but higher if they transcend it, pointing to Atlassian’s recent strong results after cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes embedded AI in the business.
“The only way you prove you’re not dying is by growing,” O’Driscoll said, adding what’s just been demonstrated – there’s a wide variety of valuations.
“It would be hard to peg value and hard to get liquidity at scale,” he said.
“The real answer to your LP is ‘it doesn’t matter what you think, Big Guy, you’re in this journey for the next 12 months. Buckle up.”
In the company’s favour, it continues to have a strong growth story. Revenue in the June quarter still grew by 25.2% on 12 months ago to hit US$921.9m (A$1.32bn).
Valuation rollercoaster
This is not the first valuation rodeo for Canva investors.
After the private company’s previous valuation peak of $54.5bn in 2021, three key VCs, Blackbird, Square Peg and AirTree, agreed to cut that valuation by 36% in 2022 amid a broader downturn in tech.
Then two years later, in October 2024, the valuation jumped by nearly a quarter to US$32 billion (A$48.7bn) in secondary market sales.
From there it kept rising rapidly, including a 14.5% pop in just six weeks to the $65bn peak 12 months ago, giving employees who sold a win.
More than $2 billion worth of shares from investors and employees changed hands in secondary sales in 2025.
How much Canva shares are worth will make little difference toits billionaire cofounders, Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, beyond the good they want to do. The duo pledged to give away 80% of their fortune away to charity in 2021 and have donated tens of millions to the Canva Foundation.
Canva has now been profitable for nine years and ended the June quarter sitting on US$1.47bn in cash.
The company was contacted for comment on its valuation but did not respond by publication.
