Canva leverages Snowflake to scale B2B growth & personalisation

Canva is using Snowflake AI Data Cloud to drive the expansion of its business-to-business operations as it continues its global growth and development.

Canva, a platform known for its wide reach in visual communication, is leveraging Snowflake's technology to deliver new features more rapidly, optimise its marketing and sales functions, and customise user experiences. This partnership supports Canva's drive to scale internationally, enabling the company to reach new markets and audiences.

The company has grown from a start-up to a business with over 230 million monthly active users and an annualised revenue exceeding USD $3 billion. Canva's enterprise customer base now includes several major corporations, such as Salesforce, HP Inc, and Expedia. The company has consistently relied on Snowflake's scalable platform to process increasing volumes of data and translate user insights into the development of new products.

Moe Kiss, Director of Data Science at Canva, commented on the partnership: "As our user base expanded, so did the complexity and volume of data. Snowflake has scaled with us throughout our hypergrowth, helping us make sense of increasing data volumes while keeping our systems efficient. Having a reliable data foundation has been crucial for us to understand the needs of our users and to make informed product decisions as we continue to innovate across our visual communication platform."

Erin Foxworthy, Industry Principal, Marketing and Advertising at Snowflake, also highlighted Canva's data strategy: "Canva exemplifies how data can drive extraordinary business growth. By putting user insights at the centre of their decision-making process, they've created a platform that delights hundreds of millions while building a thriving enterprise business. We're proud that Snowflake has been the data foundation supporting their remarkable data and AI journey."

Canva utilises Snowflake in several ways to support its enterprise expansion. The company has optimised its sales and marketing efforts, enhancing areas such as lead routing, scoring, and data enrichment. These improvements have been central to Canva's shift from an individual-focused platform to one serving wider enterprise needs, particularly through its Canva Enterprise offering.

Ongoing innovation at Canva has also been underpinned by Snowflake's capabilities. The data platform assists Canva in validating development at scale and accelerating the release of new features, such as Canva Sheets, which is described as a visual-first spreadsheet. Information from various sources, including Google Analytics, is handled through Snowflake to offer insights into user behaviour and preferences, supporting the development process.

Personalisation is another area in which Canva is using Snowflake. By creating a unified view of user data, Canva can better recognise individual user preferences. This understanding has enabled the introduction of personalisation functionalities, such as AI-driven design recommendations that suggest colours, fonts, and layouts tailored to each user's history and choices.

Marketing operations have also seen changes, as Snowflake allows Canva to predict customer lifetime value and improve allocation of marketing expenditure. With access to analytical capabilities, the marketing team can measure campaign effectiveness and distribute resources more effectively across different regions.

The company is further enhancing customer segmentation by enriching user data through AI and integrating tools such as OpenAI. This provides more detailed segmentation, enabling Canva to offer more relevant and tailored experiences for its enterprise customers.

Canva is currently evaluating Snowflake's Cortex Analyst and other advanced technologies, with the intention of further strengthening its data infrastructure. These tools are set to provide deeper insights, which Canva expects will support the pace of product development and enhance the quality of customer experience.

Future plans between Snowflake and Canva include exploration of closer technical integration to allow users to convert Snowflake data into visual content within Canva. The companies indicated that this would further facilitate data-driven storytelling for customers.