Graphic design startup Canva goes global with support for six new languages

Photo credit: Canva.

Graphic design software startup Canva announced today it’s targeting new markets globally by adding six additional languages to its app. Besides English, it’s now available in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Polish. The company says this means its product is available in the native tongues of more than 1.3 billion people.

Sydney-headquartered Canva helps users create professional-looking designs quickly and easily. The startup launched in 2013 and has grown rapidly, launching an enterprise-focused product called Canva for Work and a product aimed at non-profit organizations named Canva for Good.

Localization turned out to be a big part of Canva’s global expansion.

“Enabling Canva to be accessed by everyone across the globe has been a core part of our vision from our early days,” co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins tells Tech in Asia.

When it raised a series A round worth US$15 million last December, the company said it would use the funding for international expansion – localization turned out to be a big part of that.

“This project has involved 26 linguists and more than 25 engineers throughout the process and has been coordinated by a strong core team of four,” Melanie says. “It took us a couple of months to translate into our first language, which was Spanish. And then we were able to translate the app into more languages much more rapidly.”

Besides translating the app into other languages, the team has localized it to include new layouts and templates for country-specific things like local celebrations, pictures, and fonts.

Next on the agenda is conquering Asia – Canva wants to translate the app into Japanese, Malay, Indonesian, Bengali, Thai, and traditional Chinese for Hong Kong and Taiwan by the end of 2016. It also wants to add more languages like Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian, aiming to support 15 to 20 languages within 2016 and “all major languages” by the end of 2017.

(From L to R:) Canva co-founders Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins, and Cameron Adams. Photo credit: Canva.

Growing fast

More than 10 million people have signed up to use Canva. No break down of paid and free users is available, but Melanie says that over 40,000 teams are on Canva for Work, which is a paid product.

The startup has been able to grow fast, and Melanie figures one of the most important factors for that was solving a problem that people struggle with.

The Canva co-founders learned a lot about growth from bootstrapping their previous startup.

See more about Canva