Canva recently strengthened its competitive position against Adobe by acquiring the British creative software suite Affinity. According to Canva, the acquisition should be the final piece of its portfolio puzzle.
With the acquisition of Affinity—and basically the entire underlying British company Serif—Canva gains a creative software suite for photo editing, illustration, and publishing. The suite consists of the tools Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher. The software is especially popular with Apple computer users.
Simple, affordable software
Canva believes the acquisition will allow it to offer intuitive, affordable, fast and simple professional design software. It would give designers and other creatives access to all the software they need at an affordable price and without the complexity of traditional design tooling.
The Affinity software will eventually be integrated into the entire Canva suite.
The final piece of the puzzle
Canva also sees the acquisition as the final piece in a series of acquisitions designed to make the company more competitive with Adobe, its competitor and market leader.
The Australian software company has already acquired other (European) companies. These include the AI startup Kaleido.ai, Flourish, SmartMockups, SlidesCarnival and the (open source) image banks Pexels and Pixabay.
The amount Canva paid for Affinity has not been disclosed. Speaking to Bloomberg, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht indicated that the acquisition cost several hundred million British pounds through a mix of cash and share swaps.
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