The Canva valuation used by the design company’s biggest backers, Blackbird and Airtree, fell 17 per cent to US$34.9 billion, a markdown of about A$10 billion driven by AI running costs, according to reports published on Friday 14 August.
The markdown involves no new share sale. It changes how the two venture funds value the Canva stock they already hold, and it is the sharpest reset yet for a company founded in Sydney in 2013 by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams. Blackbird and Airtree are among Canva’s longest-standing institutional shareholders, and the position is the largest in Australian venture capital.
The cut takes the two venture funds’ mark from the US$42 billion set in an employee share sale in August 2025 down to US$34.9 billion, a reduction of US$7.1 billion that converts to roughly A$10 billion. Both funds based the move on independent external assessments of the company.
Canva’s own independent valuer has moved further still. The figure used to price employee shares fell from US$38.9 billion to US$31 billion over the past year, a deeper discount than the one applied by the funds that have backed the company since its early rounds.
The company has also lowered its expected revenue growth for 2026 by a third, to 20 per cent. Second quarter revenue of US$921.9 million grew 25.2 per cent year on year but missed Canva’s internal guidance.
Behind the miss sits an economics problem with AI. Some of Canva’s AI features have cost up to six times more to serve than users pay for them, TechJuice reported. The company has cut the cost of each AI task by roughly 90 per cent since launching Canva AI 2.0 in April, partly by shifting work onto proprietary models built with acquisitions such as Leonardo.AI, but usage has tripled and absorbed much of the saving.
Chief executive Melanie Perkins has defended the slowdown as deliberate. “Rather than broadly rolling out a product before the underlying economics were ready, we decided to slow the rollout while we rebuilt the architecture, reduced unit costs and strengthened the business model,” she told Fortune.
Canva remains one of the largest private software companies anywhere, with 265 million monthly active users creating more than a billion designs a month, about US$4 billion in annualised revenue at the end of 2025 and US$1.47 billion in cash, TechJuice reported. It also anchors the local sector as the most valuable Australian startup, and its valuation flows through to the returns Blackbird and Airtree report to their own investors, which include Australian superannuation funds.
Offshore investors have been harsher than the local funds. Hours before Blackbird and Airtree disclosed their markdown, guests on the 20VC podcast debated whether AI competition could push Canva’s worth as low as US$12 billion, Capital Brief reported, with some arguing it could be worth even less.
Podcast guests argued generative AI could collapse the price of the design work Canva sells. The company’s answer has been to fold AI into its own subscriptions and drive down serving costs with its own models.
The revision lands in the middle of Canva’s run at public markets. The company had been expected to list in the second half of 2026 on the back of its US$42 billion share sale, and a float at anything near that level would rank among the largest ever by an Australian founded technology company.
Analyst Derek Hernandez has said a 2027 listing now looks more likely, according to The Next Web, with the slower rollout framed as protecting profitability before Canva faces public investors. The company has not announced a new timetable for the float.
