Canva, the world’s only all-in-one visual communication platform, announced the acquisition of Affinity, the award-winning creative software suite for professional photo editing, illustration, graphic design and page layout.

The acquisition significantly bolsters Canva’s vision to build the world’s most comprehensive suite of visual communication tools. While the last decade has seen rapid growth for Canva amongst the 99% of knowledge workers without design training, the integration of Affinity’s professional design software now unlocks the full spectrum of designers at every level and stage of the design journey. As visual communication becomes the status quo in teams and organizations around the world, the acquisition also accelerates Canva’s enterprise ambitions, unlocking a future where professional designers can craft designs and templates with Affinity to scale across organizations with Canva.

The Affinity and Canva Pledge:

1. We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.

2. We will double down on expanding Affinity’s products through continued investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite.

3. We will provide Affinity free for schools and nonprofits.

4. We are committed to listening and being led by the design community at every step in this journey.
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Dieter Telfser 2024

Launched in 2013, Canva is a free online visual communications and collaboration platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates ranging from presentations, documents, websites, social media graphics, posters, apparel to videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage, and audio clips, anyone can take an idea and create something beautiful.

Founded in 1987, Serif is the parent company behind Affinity, the renowned suite of creative tools for professional designers and photographers. Affinity’s cost-effective, high-quality and powerful design tools Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher have been recognised with industry-leading awards, gained plaudits from reviewers and are trusted by more than 3 million customers around the world. Serif employs approximately 90 people and is based in Nottingham, UK.

Europe-based acquisitions continue to fuel Canva’s product strategy — Acquisitions from Europe’s startup ecosystem have elevated Canva’s technology and continue to play an important role in expanding the company’s physical presence in the region. Over the years, Canva has found high caliber talent and compatible technology in Europe with a number of acquisitions that have become key to the company’s product strategy. Affinity marks Canva’s latest  Europe-based acquisition, joining  Flourish (2022), Kaleido (2021), Smartmockups (2021), Pexels (2019) and Pixabay (2019). Canva opened their first European HQ in 2023, based in London.