Canva says more than 100 million people now use its design platform every month, across 190 countries. The company adds that it gained more than 15 million of them after the launch of its Visual Worksuite, the set of workplace products it announced in Sydney a month earlier, and that paid adoption by teams tripled in under a year.

Monthly active users is a generous measure. It counts anyone who opens the product in a month, not someone who pays, and Canva is free at its base. The figure it pairs with it — more than four million paying customers on Canva for Teams — is the one closer to a business, and the company describes that number as having tripled as consumers, schools and workplaces took up the suite.

What a user number does and does not measure

Canva's co-founder and chief executive, Melanie Perkins, says the growth shows demand for a platform that is collaborative and simple, and the company points to more than 10,000 jobs advertised on LinkedIn that list Canva as a skill as evidence that visual communication has become part of ordinary work. A recruitment signal is a reasonable proxy for demand, though it measures what employers want, not what their staff actually use.

The milestone is real and it is the company's own. What it does not say is how many of those 100 million are occasional users who open the product once and drift away, or how many of the paying teams renew. Those numbers, not the headline, decide whether growth is durable. Canva has shown that a design tool can reach a very large audience; whether the workplace keeps using it as the visual trend matures, and whether free users ever become paying ones, is the half of the story a milestone cannot tell.