iWorld
Canva Marks its tenth anniversary with a groundbreaking AI design suite
Mumbai: Canva, the world’s only all-in-one visual communication platform, celebrates 10 years of innovation with the launch of Canva’s Magic Studio. Reinforcing Canva’s mission to democratize design, Magic Studio is the world’s most comprehensive AI design platform empowering individuals,
“A decade ago, Canva set out to empower the world to design by simplifying a complex and fragmented design ecosystem. As we go into the next decade of our journey, we’re incredibly excited to be taking a massive leap forward with the launch of Magic Studio – the first all-in-one suite of design AI tools created to supercharge the way teams create and scale visual content,” said Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins. “With a focus on making complex things simple, Magic Studio has been built for the 99 per cent of the world without complex design training. This launch marks the start of an exciting new chapter as we double down on empowering over 150 million individuals and thousands of businesses to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals.”
Magic Studio marks the latest in a series of major product milestones over the past 12 months, including the launch of Canva’s enterprise-focused Visual Suite in September 2022 and the rollout of new AI and marketer tools at Create this March. Fueled by the proliferation of visual communication at work, more than 65 million new users have started using Canva in the last year – a milestone that originally took the company eight years to achieve. Canva currently has 16 million paying subscribers and more than 150 million users worldwide. The company’s early set of AI-powered design products has been used more than 3 billion times.
Magic Studio – The AI Design Platform for the Other 99 per cent.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence presents an extraordinary opportunity for individuals and organisations to realize their innate creative potential. Despite an onslaught of new tools, AI-powered design remains geared towards design professionals and exists in a highly complex and fragmented market, limiting the incredible potential of this technology for the 99 per cent of workers who need to create more content than ever without advanced design skills.
Magic Studio is a first-of-its-kind suite of AI tools built on proprietary models, in partnership with industry leaders, and through its rapidly growing app ecosystem. Magic Studio infuses the best of AI across every part of Canva as the first and only truly all-in-one and interoperable AI design offering on the market. When time is short and productivity cannot be compromised, Magic Studio can generate compelling content, fast-track first drafts, automate mundane tasks, design like an expert, massively accelerate the creation process, and much more.
Starting today, Magic Studio offers the following and more:
● Magic Switch: An industry-first offering that instantly converts designs into a range of formats with one click. Turn a presentation into an executive summary or create a blog post from a whiteboard of ideas, plus, translate it into various languages in the process.
● Magic Media (text-to-image and text-to-video functionality): Turn text into engaging photos and, with its latest update, explore a wide range of new style options for any result. Or, create compelling videos from an image or text using gen-two, a video generation AI model by Runway.
● Magic Design: Turn a prompt or your own media into captivating and fully designed videos, presentations and more. Speed up the creation process by simply entering your idea, selecting colour schemes and watching complete designs come to life ready to be shared or further customised to your liking.
● Brand Voice: Canva’s Magic Write copywriting assistant has been supercharged with brand voice. It’s easier than ever to write in your brand’s tone of voice in any design or document. Simply add guidelines to your Brand Kit to generate on-brand content every time.
● Magic Morph: Turn your design from ordinary to extraordinary by instantly transforming words and shapes into new colours, textures, patterns and styles with a simple prompt.
● Magic Grab: A whole new way to reimagine your images. Magic Grab can select and separate any subject in your photo so that you can edit, reposition, or resize it.
● Magic Expand: Perfect photos after they’ve been taken. Magic Expand can save zoomed-in images or turn a vertical shot horizontal by recovering whatever’s outside the frame.
● AI Apps on Canva: The Canva Apps Marketplace puts the best AI-powered design and productivity tools on the market all in one place. Now with access to world-leading AI including Dall-E, Imagen by Google Cloud, MurfAI, Soundraw and more.
Canva Shield – Industry-Leading Safety, Privacy and Indemnification
In addition to Magic Studio, Canva also announced the launch of Canva Shield – an industry-leading and enterprise-grade collection of robust trust, safety and privacy controls designed to provide teams and organizations with peace of mind when creating content. Team administrators have full control over how Magic Studio products are enabled and used across the workplace and can toggle these features based on employee roles at any time.
Canva Shield is the latest in the company’s substantial and ongoing investment in trust and safety following the integration of powerful automated content moderation, prompt filtering, reporting functionalities and the launch of an industry-first debiasing model ensuring Magic Studio products produce safe and inclusive results. For enterprise customers, Canva Shield also includes indemnification, providing additional peace of mind for organisations creating content with AI.
A Leading Creator Compensation Program
In recognition of the importance of creators and designers, Canva also announced a $200 million commitment in content and AI royalties to be paid to the company’s creator community over the next three years. The Creator Compensation Program will pay Canva Creators who consent to have their content used to train the company’s proprietary AI models.
Underscoring its commitment to transparency, Canva will provide creators the choice to opt out of their data being used for training purposes. Creators who opt into training AI models on their existing content will receive an initial payment followed by a monthly payment for continued use.
“The future of design will be determined by human creativity but will also be fueled by unprecedented levels of AI innovation,” said Canva head of AI Danny Wu. “Creators are at the heart of our community, so we fully embrace our responsibility to ensure that we’re offering them AI-powered tools that are firmly grounded in transparency, as well as ethical and fair practices every step of the way.”
Fueling Visual Communication in the Enterprise
As Canva enters its next decade, the company remains focused on democratizing design in the workplace. A year since the launch of Canva’s Visual Suite which introduced collaborative documents, websites, presentations, whiteboards, data visualization, and more – Canva is experiencing unprecedented workplace growth and adoption, adding more than 65 million new monthly active users in a year while nearly doubling paid subscribers to over 16 million.
More and more, professionals are expected to communicate visually at work. There are more than one million people now listing Canva as a core skill on their LinkedIn profile – a figure that’s surged 72 per cent year-over-year as visual communication becomes the status quo. For this reason, Canva’s traction in the enterprise is growing rapidly with large companies like FedEx, Starbucks, Colgate Palmolive, Zoom, Reddit, and others that rely on Canva as their visual communication tool of choice.
Canva’s all-in-one platform, now supercharged with more AI-powered design tools, is unlocking entirely new levels of creativity while empowering individuals, teams, and enterprises to create visual communication at scale like never before. To learn more about all of the functionality included within Canva’s Magic Studio, visit the Canva Newsroom.
iWorld
MS Dhoni invests in Kuku, joins Kuku TV as brand ambassador
Cricket icon backs AI storytelling platform, fronts Kuku TV campaign
MUMBAI: MS Dhoni has invested in Kuku and joined its short-form drama app Kuku TV as brand ambassador, signalling a high-profile bet on India’s fast-growing AI-led content space.
Kuku, a mobile-first storytelling platform, operates across formats with apps such as Kuku TV for micro-dramas, Kuku FM for audio content and Guru for learning-led entertainment. Founded in 2018, the company has scaled rapidly, crossing 350 million installs and building a catalogue of over 20,000 titles across multiple Indian languages.
Dhoni said his decision to invest and partner with the platform was driven by its distinct approach to storytelling and its strong growth trajectory. MS Dhoni said, “I chose to invest in Kuku, and also come on board as the ambassador for Kuku TV, because the platform really stood out to me. It has built a differentiated entertainment experience for audiences across India, spanning multiple languages and formats. The growth has been impressive, and I connect strongly with the founders, who come from small towns like mine and have built something of this scale. I believe in their vision of building an AI-driven storytelling platform from Bharat, for Bharat, and for the world.”
Founded by Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Kumar Meena and Vikas Goyal, the platform positions itself at the intersection of technology and storytelling, using AI to create and distribute bite-sized content tailored to mobile audiences.
Sharing his perspective, Kuku co-founder and CEO Lal Chand Bisu said, “MS Dhoni is known for backing bold decisions that others might hesitate to take. At Kuku, we are also taking bold bets. That spirit of unconventional thinking resonates deeply with us.”
Adding to this, Kuku co-founder and COO Vinod Kumar Meena said, “Our beloved Thala is one of the rare personalities with truly nationwide appeal. As we build Kuku for all of India, that connection makes him a natural fit for us.”
Further, Kuku co-founder and CTO Vikas Goyal said, “MSD has a unique understanding of people. As we build for both creators and consumers, that perspective will be incredibly valuable, especially as we continue strengthening our AI-driven storytelling stack.”
Backing the momentum, Panthera Peak Capital managing director Nikhil Bhandarkar said, “Kuku’s vision, execution, and clarity of thought are exceptional, qualities that closely mirror MS Dhoni’s approach. We are excited to partner with the team as they build Kuku into a global entertainment platform.”
To mark the association, Kuku TV has rolled out the campaign Dhoni Watches Kuku TV, anchored by a brand film that plays on Dhoni’s instinctive decision-making. Built around short, engaging stories delivered in minutes, the campaign highlights the platform’s promise of quick, compelling entertainment.
With Dhoni stepping in as both investor and face of the brand, Kuku appears to be doubling down on its ambition to take AI-driven storytelling from India to a global audience, one short story at a time.
