In a move that came out of nowhere, online visual communication platform Canva has announced its acquisition of Affinity – one of the leading Photoshop alternatives in the photo-editing software space.
This marks the second industry-shaking acquisition this month, following the news that Nikon has acquired Red.
"The acquisition significantly bolsters Canva’s vision to build the world’s most comprehensive suite of visual communication tools," reads the official announcement.
"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."
For his part, Canva COO Cliff Obrecht was quite non-specific in what this means for Affinity users. "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."
However, Affinity CEO Ashley Hewson was much more verbose, and released his official statement in the form of a video – you can watch this below, with a full transcript beneath it.
There's sure to be plenty more fallout from this story, so we'll keep you updated as we hear more.
Hi well it's an incredibly exciting day for us today as we announce that we have just been acquired by Canva.
Now, I'm sure many of you know who Canva are; they produce a great online design and collaboration platform for all kinds of visual communications ranging from presentations to documents to whiteboards and social media graphics, that type of thing.
They're an Australian company based in Sydney, and their mission really right from the start was to empower the world to design – and they've been incredibly successful. Actually they have over 175 million, I think, active users of the Canva platform now, which is just pretty astonishing.
But the one thing that Canva don't do is actually produce any tools for creative professionals – and that's really why they ended up contacting us now. Believe it or not it was only two months ago when we had that first contact from Canva to talk about ways in which we could work together, and I think it was very clear from the start that in Canva we have found somewhat of a kindred spirit.
A lot of the the values that Canva hold dearly to them are very very similar to ours. Our mission always was to enable anyone to have access to professional creative tools, and of course we've achieved that through predominantly being incredibly affordable – and that just fits really nicely with what Canva's looking to achieve. And we really do believe bringing these two things together, our professional creative tools alongside Canva's online design platform, is going to be an incredibly strong combination moving forward.
Now I know many of you are going to be wondering, well, what does this mean for for my Affinity apps? And the great thing with this is that really nothing changes. All of our team is still here, there's no layoffs or changes in that regard whatsoever, and we're more focused than ever I think to deliver some incredible updates and improvements to our apps moving forward.
Our apps are still available on our website, the V2 app is still available as a one-off purchase, and everyone who's bought our apps previously of course can still use them in perpetuity moving forward. We've got some great updates lined up for V2 all to be delivered free of charge of course so nothing changes in that regard.
I think if anything, actually now we've got an opportunity really to lean on some of Canva's resources to actually even accelerate the development of our apps even further. So I think there's lots of things to kind of look forward to for you all.
I do want to take this opportunity to extend my thanks and gratitude to all of you, all of our customers and the Affinity community. The support that you've shown us over the last ten years since releasing Affinity has just been incredible. We know most of our sales come from word of mouth and recommendations, and it's you guys that have been doing that for us.
We love listening to your feedback, to your comments, to your requests that we make in the apps, and we're more focused than ever to be delivering the features and the updates and improvements that you want to see in your Affinity apps.
I also want to take an opportunity to thank the Affinity team. I believe what we've achieved as a team here – there's only 90 of us working out of Nottingham – and what we've done in the last ten years with such a small team has just been utterly incredible.
So look, we'll be sending some information I think in the next few days about a Q&A session that we'll be doing in a few weeks time where we can answer any more of your queries on this. We're obviously here to listen to any comments and questions that you have, and we'll be trying to answer all of them in due course. But the main message really for me is that I really now believe with Canva behind us this is going to be the most exciting period in our history – and the future is seriously bright. Thank you.
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