Canva COO Cliff Obrecht says the company hit $4B in ARR at the end of 2025, had 265M+ MAUs and 31M+ paid users, and expects to IPO in the next “couple of years”
Creative company Canva ended 2025 on a high note with a 20% increase in monthly active users, growth that was partially propelled by adoption of its AI tools.
Context & Ripple Effects
Canva's latest figures extend a growth arc from its reported $2B-plus annualized revenue in 2023 to more than $3.3B in annualized sales and 240M-plus MAUs during its 2025 staff stock sale.
The new ARR, user, and paid-user totals give more operating context to that $42B secondary-market valuation as management frames an IPO timeline.
First-order effects
- Canva enters its next planning cycle with $4B in reported ARR, more than 265M monthly active users, and more than 31M paid users—metrics that strengthen its case to employees, investors, and prospective public-market buyers.
- AI-tool adoption is now tied to reported user growth, making continued product uptake a more visible part of Canva's operating narrative ahead of a potential IPO.
Second-order effects
- Creative-software rivals face a higher benchmark for combining broad free-user reach, paid conversion, and AI-assisted product adoption; Canva's scale makes those measures harder to treat as separate goals.
- The prospective IPO puts greater emphasis on whether Canva can sustain growth from its existing user base, rather than relying solely on private share sales for liquidity and price discovery.
Third-order effects
- If Canva proceeds toward an IPO, private creative-software companies may increasingly be judged on recurring revenue, paid-user depth, and demonstrable AI adoption rather than valuation alone.
- The pattern points to AI features becoming a distribution and retention lever in creative tools; whether that translates into durable public-market value will depend on the economics of serving those users.
The trend: AI-enabled creative platforms are moving from private-growth narratives toward public-market readiness, where adoption must be matched by recurring monetization and durable unit economics.