18 BWA | JUL 2026 turning Canva into a more conversational and agentic creation environment. What is notable here is not just product velocity, but the consistency of the strategic direction: under Perkins, Canva keeps trying to reduce the friction between an idea and a finished piece of work. Perkins’ current chapter is also defined by the way she has expanded Canva upmarket without letting it lose its broader mass-market identity. In 2024, Canva acquired Affinity, a move the company said would help it support professional creatives with more advanced tools. The next year, Canva formally relaunched Affinity and later explained that it had the financial strength to make it free because Canva itself had become a profitable, rapidly growing business with 28 million paying customers and $3.5 billion in annualized revenue. This is one of the most strategically interesting parts of Perkins’ leadership: she has managed to grow Canva from a tool that once disrupted the low end of the design market into a company now reaching further into professional creative workflows as well. That same expansion logic is visible in Canva’s adjacent acquisitions. In 2024, the company acquired Leonardo. Ai, saying the deal would strengthen its visual-AI capabilities and bring a team of around 120 researchers, engineers and designers into the business. Then in 2026, Canva announced the acquisitions of Simtheory and Ortto, describing them as ways to add agentic AI and customer-data-driven marketing automation into the platform. Seen together, those moves say something important about Perkins as a leader: she is not only growing Canva through organic product rollout, but through carefully chosen acquisitions that widen the platform from design into AI, workflow and marketing operations. Under her leadership, Canva has become less a single product and more an expanding creative operating environment. What makes that current success more impressive is how clearly it links back to Perkins’ earliest business instincts. Before Canva, she co-founded Fusion Books with Cliff Obrecht, applying a simple drag-and-drop design approach to school yearbooks. In an interview reflecting on that period, Perkins said Fusion Books became the largest yearbook company in Australia and expanded into France and New Zealand. That earlier
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