Canva is one of the largest businesses in Australia that isn't listed on a stock exchange.
It's a technology business that describes its main service as an online design and publishing tool. It boasts that it is used in 190 countries and that more than 10 billion designs have been created using Canva.
However, it has big plans to become much more than it is today as a graphic design business.
The business announced at its first Canva Create global event that it's launching the Visual Worksuite, which involves a range of software offerings for clients to use.
In a bid to shake things up in the technology word, it announced a couple of major additions, on top of its graphics design software and video editing.
Image source: Getty Images
Canva Docs
The document space was dominated by Microsoft for decades, then Alphabet became a major competitor, but it has largely just been those two.
Canva announced that it's launching an offering that will enable documents to be "beautiful as well as functional".
Launching later this year, Canva Docs will "seamlessly combine rich text, engaging media, and powerful data visualizations in any document you create." It will be able to connect with all of the other Canva products already in existence.
A key selling point will be that people will be able to "embed graphs, videos, and other rich visual elements into your work."
Collaboration is also an important focus with features like being able to work together in real-time on documents, leave comments, assign tasks, create to-do lists and so on. Documents will be able to be shared online as a Canva link or with a branded URL.
Canva Websites
The Aussie tech business is launching its offering for people to be able to build "beautiful, responsive, and interactive websites for any device…with just a few clicks, anyone can use Canva to easily build a personalized website with its own custom domain."
There have been 2 million websites already created using Canva.
It'll come with lots of templates, with things like food menus and school assignments as options.
How much will this mean to Canva?
Canva has previously had a reported value of $40 billion, based on institutional investors buying a small stake at that price level.
However, its value has sunk as the valuation of tech companies on share markets dropped amid fast inflation and rising interest rates.
According to reporting by the Australian Financial Review, Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and chief operating officer of Canva, said:
We very much think we will exceed our previous valuation in the not-too-distant future.
This is the next step in getting inside big businesses, of all different types, through useful tools that tap into this global movement towards visual communication.
We've already got deep penetration into every café that wants to create a menu. But the ways that larger businesses are working has changed, and visual communication between teams has become a critical part of organisations.
Instead of using twenty different tools to do all your work, the idea now is to have everything in one place.
Foolish takeaway
While Canva is not an ASX share (yet), it's interesting to see how it's progressing. Canva could be a challenge to some of the biggest technology businesses in the world.
