How Canva Won OpenAI's Developer Day

Canva co-founder Cameron Adams speaks exclusively with Upstarts about his startup's OpenAI partnership and wider AI strategy.

“We think we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” says Canva co-founder Cameron Adams about its AI approach. Credit: Canva

“We are now the visual layer for AI.”

Upstarts is chatting with Canva co-founder Cameron Adams about his startup’s integration with OpenAI.

If you tuned in for the OpenAI’s developer day yesterday – or simply couldn’t avoid the broadside of headlines and breathless posts about it on social media – you know that OpenAI announced that it’s basically turning ChatGPT into an app store, and Canva is one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ partners it tapped as a pilot partner for the new capability.

Sam Altman paused onstage yesterday for an OpenAI employee to walk viewers through how Canva now works in ChatGPT: prompt it to use Canva to generate a design or resize an image for social media, and it’ll do it within OpenAI’s interface, pulling in files or brand assets from your Canva account.

Possibly more exciting for Canva: ChatGPT might surface up Canva to some of its 800 million weekly users who don’t yet know how to ask for it, too. For Canva, which has about 240 million people designing in its own software each month, it’s customer acquisition through AI prompt.

“This is the creative operating system for the AI era,” says Adams. “It’s how AI assistants and AI tools can express themselves in a much more visual way.”

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You can watch Altman’s presentation yourself on YouTube; plenty of stories will also tell you how OpenAI is thinking about, or at least messaging, its news.

But at Upstarts, we covered Canva extensively while still at Forbes, and we still find what CEO Melanie Perkins and co. are building to be both visually appealing and broadly important.

So to help you get more perspective on what this news means for a leading startup in the ecosystem that’s not OpenAI, we chatted exclusively with Adams, over a video chat connection to Sydney.

“It’s a really exciting opportunity, and it’s really powerful for us as well,” he says.

The key takeaways – and lessons from this partnership for other startups – are below.