Launched in 2013 in Sydney, Australia, Canva has grown from a simple drag-and-drop tool to a global visual design platform used by more than 240 million people to design everything from social media posts and presentations to full websites and videos. And with its recent release of Canva AI, people can now turn their ideas into stunning designs by just having a conversation.
From the start, Stripe has helped power Canva’s growth as it expanded to new markets, launched new business lines, and localized its offerings to meet the unique needs of its users. By providing flexible, scalable, and developer-friendly payments infrastructure, Stripe supports Canva’s in-house billing system while enabling it to customize the payment experience for users around the world.

“Stripe was one of our first partners, and has been with us since we were both startups,” said Emily MacDonald, group product manager, revenue platform at Canva. “It’s been phenomenal to see how Stripe helped us unlock scale while growing into a deep, collaborative partnership where we are co-creating our roadmap. We have a lot of vendors, but Stripe is the gold standard for what we love to see in a partner.”

Global reach, local experience

Because Canva is used worldwide, it needed a payment system as intuitive and customizable as its design platform. Canva and Stripe have worked side by side to build localized payment experiences for the company’s top 40 markets.

“One of the biggest standouts for our team is the access we have to Stripe’s product, engineering, and support teams,” MacDonald said. “When we bring challenges to the table, Stripe not only listens, they invest.”

This collaboration has delivered significant results in two strategic markets. In India, a 2021 regulatory change disrupted the ability of global businesses to process recurring payments.

Stripe created a solution that manages mandate registration and automatically sends pre-debit notifications before charging customers. This technical advancement enabled Canva to explore new possibilities with recurring payments while adhering to India’s e-mandate requirements.

“We really leaned on Stripe to develop a solution for us to reintroduce recurring payments, MacDonald said. “This has opened up exciting opportunities for us to experiment with different models. We’re seeing promising results as we continue to refine our approach in this important market.”

In South Korea, where mobile wallets are ubiquitous and local card networks deliver higher authorization rates, Canva faced challenges due to a fragmented payment ecosystem. Previously relying on cross-border card transactions, Canva partnered with Stripe to implement domestic acquiring to support local cards and local mobile wallets KakaoPay and Naver Pay. Since going live in 2024, Canva has increased their payment reach by over 9.5 million users.

“Going with local acquiring and local payment methods all in one project is another example of Stripe helping us successfully enter a major market, which was a big win for us,” MacDonald said.

Always on, always improving

Canva continues to work closely with Stripe to uncover new ways to improve its payments experience with the Payments Intelligence Suite, Stripe’s AI-powered set of payment optimisations, fraud prevention, and business intelligence products.

For example, Canva uses Stripe's Authorization Boost, which leverages network tokens, card account updater, and Adaptive Acceptance, which uses AI to intelligently retry transactions in real time. Together, these payment optimizations helped increase Canva’s payment success rates by 2.1% and saved over 1.5% in network costs.

Stripe also helped Canva assess its fraud rules in Radar for Fraud Teams to strike the right balance between managing risk and optimising conversion based on its business model and users. The Stripe technical account manager worked with Stripe’s professional services and Canva’s newly formed payment fraud team to review and fine-tune each rule so Canva could reduce its risk without introducing too many false positives. This review allowed Canva to focus rules on new customers’ first transactions, which are riskiest.

“Fraud is not only a problem from a revenue perspective, but from a brand perspective,: MacDonald said. “We don’t want a customer to have a bad experience because their card was used by a fraudster or they weren’t able to complete a checkout because they were inadvertently flagged. Stripe helped our fraud team understand what rules supported our risk tolerance, especially as we’ve scaled.”

Stripe's data solutions help Canva gain insights faster and make more informed decisions. With Payments analytics, Canva gets actionable insights that help them understand and improve payments performance, including factors that affect card acceptance rates and the financial impact of disputes. Canva uses Stripe Sigma to run SQL queries within the Dashboard to quickly explore Stripe data, ranging from analyzing network costs to uncovering customer trends. And with Data Pipeline, Canva sends Stripe data to their Snowflake data warehouse to combine it with other business data, allowing them to conduct a deeper analysis that provides a more complete view of their business performance.

Canva also has high trust in Stripe to support their transaction volume growth. With Stripe powering payments in many of its top markets, Canva knows it will always be ready to serve its customers, especially during traffic spikes around the holidays, marketing pushes, and its Canva Create events.

As Canva looks ahead, MacDonald believes the company’s future will be intertwined with a select group of trusted, collaborative partners like Stripe. One of the areas Canva is most excited about is leveraging AI to orchestrate payments and fraud detection in a multigateway environment to further optimize routing at the country, bank identification number (BIN), and product level.

“With the speed of evolution of payments, it feels like we’re in this unique moment right now where we can co-create the future of payments together,” MacDonald said.