Canva Announces Developer Platform and $50 Million App Development Fund

Canva, the visual communications platform, today unveiled its Canva Developer Platform at Canva Extend, its inaugural developer conference in San Francisco. The new platform consists of a comprehensive set of APIs and developer tools, allowing developers to connect to Canva’s 135 million strong monthly active user base.

To help drive the creation of innovative experiences for the Canva community, the company also revealed the creation of a $50 million Canva Developers Innovation Fund.

The investment initiative aims to help app developers create, grow and market their apps on the Canva App Marketplace. The fund will provide financial grants and expert advice to help developers, especially those from underrepresented groups in the global marketplace, turn their app concepts into tangible products.

According to the company, a crucial part of this offering is the Canva Apps SDK, which provides access to resources such as javascript libraries, documentation, sample apps, UI guides, and most notably, news. CanvaApps API.

These APIs – Asset, Design, Data, Fetch, and User – enable the creation of a wide range of applications, from AI-powered tools and workflow integrations to design enhancements. Canva Apps will allow customers to retrieve and add content, edit their designs, authenticate users, export and publish their work, and contribute data.

Canva said the APIs work seamlessly to provide Canva users with new opportunities to excel at their jobs.

“The first set of beta-developed apps launched in March and were used over 11 million times in just two and a half months. These experiences allowed us to optimize the speed and ease of the new Canva SDK Apps – we’ve enabled developers to get an app up and running in minutes,” Anwar Haneef, Canva’s ecosystem lead, told VentureBeat. “We want apps that are easy to build, discover, and use, and We’ve done our best to make this workable for developers. Now you can run an app locally, render it in Canva, and immediately use it in your designs, rather than uploading it to the product and fiddling with it for design. make it work.

In addition to these announcements, the company unveiled a diverse collection of over 20 apps on Canva Extend, some already available and others slated for release.

These apps extend Canva’s capabilities, allowing users to publish magazines through the Issuu publishing platform, generate audio using Soundraw’s AI technology, and create AI-generated avatars. with D–ID.

Expand opportunities for app developers

Canva says the newly-launched developer platform’s free app building capability provides a substantial opportunity for developers to pitch their ideas and services directly to a wide range of audiences, including large enterprise teams, students, teachers, non-profit organizations and individual creators.

Developers can monetize their creations through off-platform billing, while Canva plans to explore additional monetization strategies through the Canva Developers Innovation Fund.

“Our goal is to accelerate the growth and adoption of apps on Canva with support, including monetary grants, marketing support and expertise, and explore effective monetization strategies,” Haneef said of Can go. “The fund is meant to be agile, so we can assess the needs of our users and the needs of our community and use that to build the most sustainable ecosystem possible.”

Haneef said one of the fund’s goals is to seek out developers who might be underrepresented in the global marketplace and provide them with what they need to bring their amazing idea to life.

“There’s so much talent out there, and we want to open up opportunities and resources to those who wouldn’t normally have access to them. We are excited about the opportunities this will create for our community and will share more details about the program with the Canva developer community later this year,” he added.

API Connect will launch later this year, with a waitlist opening today. These integrations, the company said, would facilitate features such as streamlined file and design management, uploading of programmatic assets to folders to speed up team collaboration, and seamless access to completed designs from scratch. any platform.

“Connect APIs let you connect any app to Canva to sync designs, assets, feedback, and more across platforms. This is critical to furthering our vision of becoming the most pluggable platform” , Haneef said, “Developers can also use them to manage user access to Canva assets, folders, and designs.”

On the role of APIs in supporting AI app development, Haneef said the new Canva Apps APIs provide the ability to build apps for generating photos, videos, audio and text. AI-based.

For example, an upcoming image-generating app called PeopleMaker by Visual will soon be available on Canva, allowing users to create realistic photos of individuals. Another example is Voice by Play.HT, a text-to-speech application, which customers can use to generate voiceovers for their designs.

“Over 200 million unique images were generated in nine months with our generative AI products like Text to Image and Magic Edit. The space is changing rapidly and partnering with developers means we can bring more AI-based solutions to our community faster,” Haneef explained. “As generative AI evolves beyond text-prompting interfaces, our APIs also allow applications to read design elements and update them accordingly. In many cases, users don’t have no need to create something from scratch. With the design API, your app can read content from the design and generate new content based on that.”

What’s next for Canva?

According to Haneef, Apps Marketplace is the cornerstone of the company’s vision to become the most adaptable visual communication platform, empowering teams of all sizes. The company is confident that by granting access to its design engine to developers and integration partners, it can quickly expand its product offerings.

“We often say that we are only 1% of the way. We have a broad vision of everything Canva can do, and we can’t build it all alone,” he said. “Our goal is to foster a vibrant ecosystem of apps (and in the future, connections through the Connect API) so that we can bring the latest innovations (including AI) to our users and continue to provide intuitive solutions to common design problems.”