Australia’s most valuable start-up success story, Canva, today announced its acquisition of Affinity, a UK-based design software company. Canva co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Cliff Obrecht told Bloomberg that the deal, which represents Canva’s largest acquisition to date, is a mix of cash and stock and is worth “several hundred million pounds”.
Canva has focused on making design tools accessible to the masses—without the need for formal design training to use its online software. The company has also added a slew of AI-powered apps within the platform, such as a background remover, a text-to-image tool, and video avatars. It seems to be a winning formula, resulting in over 90 million users in the last 18 months.
The company now appears to be taking on Adobe with its Affinity acquisition. Affinity’s suite of products is reminiscent of Adobe’s long-standing offerings. Affinity Photo is the company’s answer to Adobe Photoshop, Designer to Illustrator, and Publisher to Indesign. The move to bring Affinity’s capabilities and 90-person team under the Canva banner may bridge the gap in functionality between Canva and Adobe products.
Image courtesy of Affinity.
Interestingly, Affinity has made billing a key differentiator between its products and Adobe’s. Affinity offers a one-time, subscription-free payment model, while Adobe has been pushing its Adobe Cloud subscription model for several years now. However, it remains to be seen how the Affinity suite evolves under Canva’s direction. Will it also go down the subscription road, in line with how Canva operates?
This latest acquisition marks the seventh in total, including stock image providers Pexels and Pixabay and image mock-up software Smartmockups. While the aforementioned products have enhanced the core functionalities of the Canva platform, it will be fascinating to see whether the newest Affinity acquisition will continue as a standalone product suite or become a means of bridging that Canva-Adobe gap.
Read more about the announcement here: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/
