‘India key to achieve 1 billion global customers’: Canva co-founder Cameron Adams

NEW DELHI: Canva – one of many world’s prime graphic design software program firms and a key competitor to Adobe – noticed as many as 5.3 lakh displays being made every day in India simply in 2024. The utilization was equally massive when it got here to making resumes, social media posts, and even pitch decks.
Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of Canva, says India can be a important issue because the Australian firm – final valued at round $32 billion – seems to transfer in direction of its objective of hitting one billion global customers. “India will play a critical role in us getting to a billion users,” Adams advised TOI in an interview. Excerpts:
Can you inform us in regards to the journey of Canva thus far?
We began in 2012 in Sydney and launched our first product the following 12 months, with an thought of empowering the world to design. We realised that design was a superpower that you may give to those who 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 one million folks within the first 18 months, and now are at 220 million customers that use our product internationally.
How massive is the Indian marketplace for you, and what’s the adoption of Canva right here?
India is considered one of our most crucial markets. It’s not too long ago gone from being our fifth hottest market to being the fourth hottest. It’s rising up via the ranks and even rising sooner than a variety of the world. That’s why we have been eager to put money into India over the previous couple of years. The funding that we put into the group and merchandise right here pays dividends.
The draft guidelines for digital private information safety regulation say that govt can put restrictions on switch of sure class of non-public information outdoors 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’re more and more seeing international locations and areas like Europe bringing in their very own information safety legal guidelines and requiring information sovereignty. So, creating the techniques the place we are able to do this globally is definitely a spotlight of considered one of our groups. I do not assume it is an issue in India, particularly as a result of as soon as we have the appropriate infrastructure that we are able to spin up, we are able to do this pretty simply throughout areas.
Will you have a look at storing information on native servers right here?
We’re undoubtedly trying on the infrastructure mechanisms by how we do this, like how we construction our code, how we have now our service arrange, how we replicate information throughout areas, and so forth. Our engineering groups are trying into it… I am unable to say particularly about India proper now, however we’re undoubtedly taking a look at techniques that allow that in numerous areas round.