Rechat now provides listing data to Canva, providing users with access to high-resolution listing photos, agent information and property descriptions directly in Canva’s design platform.
Additionally, Canva designs can now be added directly to Rechat with one click, Rechat said in a press release, further consolidating agent workflow.
“Real estate professionals need to move at the speed of the market without sacrificing quality,” said Chris Hadges, head of Canva for Real Estate. “By integrating with Rechat, we are empowering agents to turn live property data into polished, on-brand marketing materials in minutes.”
Canva users can integrate Rechat by adding the Rechat app to their account, logging in and allowing listing access.
“This is about removing friction from the creative process and meeting agents where they want to work,” said Rechat Founder and CEO Shayan Hamidi. “By allowing our users to send Rechat’s listing data directly into Canva, we’re giving them the ability to create high quality marketing assets instantly.”
Rechat, a unified operating system for real estate agents, has existing partnerships with tech companies including SkySlope and Follow Up Boss.
On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced the dual acquisition of startups Cavalry, which works on animation, and Mango AI, which works on improving ad performance.
UK-based Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for different verticals such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva said that Cavalry’s tooling will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts, which it acquired in 2024
Canva revamped Affinity’s design last year and made it free for all users. The company said that since then, people have downloaded the software over five million times. Affinity has the capabilities of photos, vector, and layout editing. With this acquisition, Canva wants to add motion editing to its suite.
“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re closing that [motion editing] gap and unlocking a complete professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work, while preserving the depth and control professional creatives rely on,” it added.
Besides Cavalry, Canva has also acquired stealth startup MangoAI, which was working on building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance, according to its website. Canva said that the startup’s first product helped clients create and launch ads and observe outcomes to improve future campaigns.
MangoAI was built by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said that Govind will become Canva’s first ” Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products.
In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief and later last year, it launched a growth tool called Canva Grow for asset creation and performance measurement.
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MangoAI Co-Founders Nirmal Govind (left) and Vinith Misra (right) together with Canva Co-Founder and COO, Cliff Obrecht (centre).Image Credits: Canva
During a sit-down at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that Canva Grow is doing “incredibly well,” especially when it comes to creating static content and publishing it to Meta platforms.
“It is quite an early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot more things around video creation, deploying across multi platform,” Obrecht had said. “So it’s very early, but it’s very much got a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and then we’re scaling up massively.”
With the new acquisitions, the company wants to bolster its position as a marketing solution by potentially adding video creation and more granular measurement. Canva closed 2025 at $4 billion in annualized revenue with more than 265 million users and 31 million paid users.
As more and more of Generation Z embraces side hustles, they’re increasingly leaning on artificial intelligence to help them get ahead. A new survey by Canva finds that 80 percent of the people who have side hustles have used AI to fuel the growth of those enterprises, with 74 percent calling it their secret weapon.
The tools, including ChatGPT and Canva’s own online graphic design offerings, are being used for everything from video creation and logo/brand design to data analysis and copywriting. And some of those side hustles are becoming full-time businesses.
Side hustles, on the whole, have never been hotter. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 8.9 million Americans are currently working multiple jobs. That’s 5.4 percent of the country’s workforce. And a SurveyMonkey study published earlier this month found “72 percent of workers either already have or are considering a side gig—37 percent already have a side hustle, and 35 percent are considering pursuing one.”
Some 22 percent of the people surveyed by Canva said they were inspired to start their own company after launching a side gig and 17 percent said the work led to a consulting or freelancing job. Additionally, 33 percent said they had gained new clients or customers, while 29 percent said their side gig had helped build their professional brand. Gen Z was the generation most likely to start passive income side hustles: Of those with side hustles, 48 percent of Gen Z are currently earning passive income.
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All totaled, two-thirds of the 300 “5-9 influencers,” as Canva calls them, said they would consider quitting their full-time jobs if they believed their side projects could sustain them.
They wouldn’t be the first. Some very familiar tech companies got their start as side hustles or side projects, including Groupon, Twitter, Craigslist, and Instagram (which began as Burbn, a location-based app for whiskey lovers). And thousands of other, smaller businesses, began as a part-time side gig for the founder, eventually growing to multi-million dollar businesses.
Today’s side hustle community is made up of a mix of generations. Canva’s survey found that just under half of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers were making money from side gigs today, with the actual percentages ranging from 40 to 48.
Increasingly, the side hustles they’re choosing are digitally-focused. The most popular jobs were social media creator (35 percent), e-commerce (27 percent), gaming and streaming (24 percent), and graphic design (14 percent).
Extra income is the biggest motivator for people who have side gigs, Canva found, but it wasn’t the only one. Some 36 percent of the respondents said they were running their side hustle because they enjoyed the creative expression it gave them. And just under one-third said they wanted to turn a passion into a business.
Even people with side hustles who aren’t looking to launch a business of their own are seeing advantages from the work. The skills they’ve learned as part of that work, including the AI expertise they’re building, are helping people advance. Some 14 percent of the people surveyed said their side hustle had helped them get a promotion at their day job.
The future of Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher, subscription-free alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud, was uncertain after the apps’ developer Serif was acquired by Canva in 2024. Now, over a year later, the changes Canva has introduced are big, but not necessarily unwelcome. The newly relaunched Affinity by Canva combines all three apps into a single piece of illustration, photo editing and layout software, and rather than move to a subscription model as many feared, Canva’s made it entirely free. Or, at least, freemium.
Affinity is available now as a desktop app for macOS and Windows, with an iPadOS version on the way at some point in the future. The basic functionality of the app doesn’t seem all that different from the three separate apps Serif offered before, only now you can toggle between their tools via separate Vector, Pixel and Layout tabs. Canva stresses you also have the option to mix and match tools, and save custom toolbars to use for specific types of projects, if you want.
Beyond layering in chunky serif fonts, Canva’s touch seems relatively light. The Affinity app now requires a free Canva account to use and offers integrations with the company’s suite of tools, with a new option to send an Affinity project directly to Canva. The company is also making its Canva AI Studio tools available in Affinity, giving users the ability to automatically remove a background or use Generative Fill to edit part of a photo. How well veteran Affinity users will take to these changes remains to be seen, but they’ll at least be able to continue using their existing copies of the old Affinity V2 lineup.
Free sounds good, but one of the draws of the original Affinity creative suite is that you could purchase a license for Serif’s individual apps and not ever have to think about it again. Canva is promising that the new Affinity will be free going forward, but a free app that requires an account and might try to upsell you on subscription-based AI features is not quite the same thing.
Affinity wasn’t the only Adobe competitor to be acquired in 2024. Pixelmator, a developer of popular photo and image editing tools for iOS, iPadOS and macOS, was absorbed by Apple in November that same year. The company’s apps continue to be maintained, but it’s still not clear if Apple plans to shift them to a subscription model in the future.
Design software firm Canva just announced a host of new AI features aimed at streamlining the process of creating anything from video clips to marketing campaigns. The company is touting the product updates as nothing less than the dawn of a new era of creativity.
“For the last couple of decades, it’s been all about democratizing information and giving people access to as much information as possible,” Canva chief product officer Cameron Adams told Inc. in a video call ahead of a launch event in Sydney on Thursday.
Now that most people around the world have all the information they could ever want at their fingertips, the “information age” is giving way to the “imagination era,” says Adams, who co-founded Canva in 2013 with Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht. “With the rise of AI, it’s not so much about the information, but what you do with it,” Adams says. “It’s about the vision that you set for yourself and for the team around you. How do we bring our imagination to life and put it into action, so it has a real impact on the planet?”
Sydney, Australia–based Canva is certainly not alone in introducing more AI features. Both TikTok and Instagram rolled out new AI editing features in recent weeks. But Canva, which has spent close to a decade building its AI team, is baking AI features into nearly every part of its interface.
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Canva reported $3.5 billion in annualized revenue in October and says it has more than 260 million monthly active users. While it first caught fire with social media managers and college students, it’s increasingly infiltrating the corporate world, with enterprise customers like LinkedIn, Stripe, and Snowflake.
Its flexible design tools can create anything from Instagram posts to spreadsheets in seconds, and its visual, drag-and-drop interface makes it a favorite of non-designers who want to create nice looking products in a hurry.
“We spend a lot of time talking to our real estate agents about how important it is to build personal brands,” says Wendy Forsythe, the chief marketing officer of eXp Realty, the largest residential real estate firm in North America and another enterprise customer. “It’s part of what helps them differentiate themselves on why a buyer or seller would choose to buy a home or sell a home.”
With Canva, eXp Reality’s more than 80,000 agents can create their own Instagram posts, open-house fliers, and marketing materials. They can also quickly erase things like cars in driveways from photos or translate materials into multiple languages with a few clicks. As of Thursday, they can also create branded emails using drag-and-drop design tools.
In its latest product update, the company is doubling down on artificial intelligence, upgrading many existing features and introducing Canva Design Model, which the company says is the first AI model that understands the elements of design.
“When you think about a design, it’s actually quite complicated. It brings together hundreds if not thousands of different elements and aspects into something that communicates a message effectively,” says Adams. The AI needs to understand the different elements like text and images that might go into a design, the intended audience, and the end use—and how all the pieces work together.
Alongside its free, pro, and enterprise tiers, Canva also just launched Canva Business, a plan created for solopreneurs and small teams, which costs $20 a month per user.
Here are a few of the new features that can help small business owners create everything from ads to websites more efficiently.
While existing AI models can generate lifelike images and videos, Adams says Canva Design Model is the first that allows users to easily edit and customize designs such as fliers, ads, or menus. Users can specify their own brand guidelines, and once a design is generated, they can manipulate individual elements through prompts or by using Canva’s design tools. They can also generate new designs or slides based on an existing file, or ask Canva’s chatbot for tips.
Marketing campaign help
A new feature called Canva Grow helps streamline the process of creating marketing materials. The tool helps generate ideas and break down the necessary steps for a campaign. Then it helps design the elements, which can be published directly to platforms like Instagram. Once those campaigns are live, Canva Grow helps track performance and allows users to update their campaigns based on those metrics.
An easier way to collect data
Vibe coding tools have soared in popularity in recent months. But while they’re helpful for creating apps and web features, there’s often no straightforward way to collect information from those widgets on the back end. Canva just introduced the capability to link forms and other interactive designs to Sheets, the company’s spreadsheet product. The data can be collected and sorted, and also incorporated into products such as slide decks, which are automatically updated as new data comes in.
You’ll soon be able to interact with some of your favorite apps, including Spotify and Canva, right inside of ChatGPT. OpenAI announced the integration, which is enabled by the company’s new Apps SDK, during its DevDay presentation. As of today, ChatGPT can connect to a handful of apps, with more to come over time and OpenAI working on submission guidelines that will allow developers to monetize their work.
As a ChatGPT user, you can any access available third-party app by referencing it in your conversations with the chatbot. In the case of Spotify, for example, you can write “Spotify, make a playlist for my party this Friday.” The first time you mention an app in this way, you’ll be prompted to connect your account to ChatGPT. When working with Spotify, ChatGPT can make recommendations based on a mood, theme or a topic. The interface will eventually lead you to Spotify itself, where you can listen to what ChatGPT has created.
“It’s early days, so while we might not be able to deliver on every request just yet, we’ll continue to build, refine, and improve the experience over the coming weeks and months,” Spotify says of the integration.
OpenAI showed off other apps working inside of ChatGPT. For instance, an employee demoed Canva creating a few posters for a dog-walking business that they had talked to ChatGPT about starting. With today’s announcement, ChatGPT can connect to Canva, Coursera, Figma, Spotify and Zillow. In the coming weeks, DoorDash, OpenTable, Target and Uber will also work with the chatbot. And later this year, OpenAI says it will begin accepting app submissions for review and publication.
DENVER — As Colorado schools implement more artificial intelligence tools for teachers and students, Denver Public Schools is prioritizing safety with the programs it’s using.
Kali Peracchia, a technology instructional coach with Denver Public Schools, said the district is using two main AI platforms right now — Canva, a content creation and multi-media platform, and MagicSchool which was created by a former Denver educator. It has education-specific tools like a family email generator or a text leveler, as well as a chatbot for students.
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“There are safe parameters so a student can’t ask any inappropriate questions,” Peracchia said, noting that a teacher can program parameters for the chatbot.
The programs DPS is using protect data privacy and student confidentiality, Peracchia said. As the district implements more AI in classrooms, she said the hope is to enhance what students are already doing and save teachers time and resources. For example, a program called Packback uses artificial intelligence to give students feedback on their writing.
Denver Public Schools focusing on safety with artificial intelligence
“A teacher will program a rubric that’s targeted to their learning standards and once 20 or more words are put in students are getting live assessed and getting tips on how to improve their writing,” Peracchia said.
DPS has trained 1,200 teachers on AI literacy in the last year and plans to launch a student advisory council for AI at South High School this fall to allow students to provide feedback on how they’re using AI.
The Colorado Education Initiative has also launched a Roadmap for AI in K-12 Education with guidelines for schools and districts implementing artificial intelligence.
Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we approach the halfway point of the year.
2024 delivered four venture-backed tech IPOs, Reddit, Astera Labs, Ibotta and Rubrik, in March and April, which made it seem like this year could spur the momentum investors had hoped for in 2023. But secondary investors and IPO lawyers recently told TechCrunch that despite these four successes, macro conditions like the upcoming presidential election and elevated interest rates, means the IPO market won’t fully reopen until 2025.
This year is still on track to be better than 2023, and we’ll likely see a few more public filings throughout the year Companies including Klarna and Shein have engaged with bankers and seem close the line, but their IPO timelines are still murky.
For the most part, it may be easier to decipher who isn’t going public this year rather than who is. Some CEOs of late-stage startups have directly stated they won’t IPO in 2024 while other companies have made financial moves that imply a public listing isn’t imminent. Here are some of the venture-backed tech companies we don’t expect to hit the public market this year.
Plaid’s CEO Zach Perret said the B2B fintech had no plans to IPO in 2024 at an Axios event in March. This echos what TechCrunch’s own Mary Ann Azevedo reported last October after the company hired a new CFO. Plaid was valued at $13.4 billion in 2021, its most recent valuation.
While design unicorn Figma hasn’t directly said it won’t IPO this year, its actions point in that direction. In May, the company held a tender offer to allow existing investors and employees to sell their Figma shares, if they please, on the secondary market. This type of liquidity event does not generally come right before the larger liquidity event of an IPO. The tender offer did value the startup at $12.5 billion which is lower than the $20 billion Adobe was willing to pay, but also higher than the last primary round valuation Figma received, $10 billion.
Stripe also held a tender offer for its current and former employees earlier this year. In February, the fintech unicorn announced a secondary sale that valued the company at a whopping $65 billion valuation. While this is lower than the $95 billion valuation the company garnered in 2021, the company is building its valuation back up. This is a sign that Stripe will likely look to build that valuation back up a bit more before hitting the public market.
AI cloud platform Databricks isn’t likely on the docket for 2024 either — perhaps to the dismay of the VC investors who last year predicted it as the first company to go public. The company raised a fresh $500 million in capital last fall in a Series I round that valued the startup at $43 billion. While companies don’t generally raise funding right before a public listing — that is part of the IPO process after all — the investors they did raise from this round from were crossover investors like T.Rowe Price. Those are not the kind of investors that tend to object to IPOs when market conditions improve are in good shape to be one of the first listings of 2025, if they choose.
Canva isn’t likely to go public until at least next year and the design startup may very well likely wait until 2026. Co-founder Cliff Obrecht, the husband of Canva CEO Melanie Perkins told Startup Daily, an Australian and New Zealand tech publication, in March that an IPO would be at least 12 months away, if not some time in 2026. Lucky for U.S. investors though, Obrecht also confirmed that when the startup does look to go public it will do so in the U.S.
TechCrunch is monitoring the late-stage startup and exit markets and will continue to update this article. If you have any tips or callouts to bring to our attention, contact me here: rebecca.szkutak@techcrunch.com.
Canva, the world’s only all-in-one visual communication platform, has announced the acquisition of Affinity, an 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.
“Visual communication is now ubiquitous in the workplace, and investing in strategies that enhance our B2B offerings is core to the future of our business,” said Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht. “From sales and marketing to brand and creative teams, the need to create effective and engaging visual content is on the rise. The Affinity team comes with an incredible caliber of talent and technology, and we’re delighted to welcome them to Canva as we enter our next phase together.”
Affinity CEO Ashley Hewson and Canva head of Europe Duncan Clark
Empowering professional designers
Affinity stemmed from a vision to empower designers to produce high-quality content in an effective and affordable way. In 10 years, the Affinity suite of creative products has become beloved and renowned for delivering powerful experiences for professional designers. This includes offering extremely fast and highly responsive tools that deliver on all the photo and vector editing tasks required by professionals.
Today, more than 3 million users around the world trust Affinity to create everything from complex multi-layered graphics to detailed technical diagrams, art and illustration, logos, mockups, documents, magazines, and much more.
Designed for the latest hardware and packed with features to simplify real-life professional workflows, Affinity’s all-inclusive photo editing, graphic design, and desktop publishing products serve as a powerful, cost-effective, and subscription-free solution for photographers and designers requiring versatility and precision.
Their core products—Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher—have been lauded for their lightning-fast performance and seamless cross-platform compatibility across macOS, Windows, and iPadOS. To date, Affinity has won several industry awards, including an Apple Design Award, Apple App of the Year for Mac and iPad, and Microsoft Application Developer of the Year.
Canva growth surge continues
Now entering its second decade, Canva has pioneered the model for simple and effective design and is now used by more than 175 million people across 190 countries and in more than 100 languages. As visual communication becomes an imperative for every kind of industry and organization, the last few years have seen Canva make significant strides in this arena, bolstered by the introduction of Canva’s Visual Suite in September 2022.
Since then, the company has added more than 90 million new users, experiencing nine years’ worth of growth in just 18 months. The acquisition of Affinity will expand Canva’s offering of design tools into the professional design market.
Canva will continue to invest in the Affinity suite to ensure it not only meets the needs of professional designers but also enhances their experiences and empowers them to do their best work. Together, Canva and Affinity will be a powerhouse combination built to supercharge the goals of every type of designer.
“Since the inception of Affinity, our mission has been to empower creatives with tools that unleash their full potential, fostering a community where innovation and artistry flourish,” said Ashley Hewson, CEO of Affinity. “We’ve worked tirelessly to challenge the status quo, delivering professional-grade creative software that is both accessible and affordable. Canva’s commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with those values. We couldn’t be more excited about becoming part of the Canva family and can’t wait to see what we will achieve together.”
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 several 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 its first European HQ in 2023, based in London.
