‘India key to realize 1 billion world customers’: Canva co-founder Cameron Adams

NEW DELHI: Canva – one of many world’s high graphic design software program firms and a key competitor to Adobe – noticed as many as 5.3 lakh shows being made day by day in India simply in 2024. The utilization was equally large when it got here to creating resumes, social media posts, and even pitch decks.
Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of Canva, says India can be a vital issue because the Australian firm – final valued at round $32 billion – appears to maneuver in the direction of its purpose of hitting one billion world customers. “India will play a vital function in us attending to a billion customers,” Adams advised TOI in an interview. Excerpts:
Are you able to inform us concerning the journey of Canva to date?
We began in 2012 in Sydney and launched our first product the following yr, with an concept of empowering the world to design. We realised that design was a superpower that you can give to those that enabled them to do issues they could not dream of earlier than. It began off slowly and took us some time to construct momentum. It grew and grew and grew and we signed up 1,000,000 individuals within the first 18 months, and now are at 220 million customers that use our product the world over.
How large is the Indian marketplace for you, and what’s the adoption of Canva right here?
India is one in every of our most important markets. It is lately gone from being our fifth hottest market to being the fourth hottest. It is rising up by way of the ranks and even rising quicker than a variety of the world. That is why we have been eager to spend money on India over the previous couple of years. The funding that we put into the workforce and merchandise right here pays dividends.
The draft guidelines for digital private knowledge safety legislation say that govt can put restrictions on switch of sure class of private knowledge exterior India. Does this concern you?
It would not notably concern me about India as a result of this can be a sample that we’re seeing world wide. You are more and more seeing nations and areas like Europe bringing in their very own knowledge safety legal guidelines and requiring knowledge sovereignty. So, creating the programs the place we are able to try this globally is definitely a spotlight of one in every of our groups. I do not assume it is an issue in India, particularly as a result of as soon as we have the fitting infrastructure that we are able to spin up, we are able to try this pretty simply throughout areas.
Will you take a look at storing knowledge on native servers right here?
We’re undoubtedly wanting on the infrastructure mechanisms by how we try this, like how we construction our code, how we’ve got our service arrange, how we replicate knowledge throughout areas, and many others. Our engineering groups are wanting into it… I am unable to say particularly about India proper now, however we’re undoubtedly taking a look at programs that allow that in several areas round.