Australian design platform Canva forms strategic alliance with Deloitte

Professional services firm Deloitte has struck up a ‘first-of-its-kind’ strategic alliance with Canva, combining the Australian-origin design platform with its own digital transformation expertise.

Deloitte said that in delivering consistent and unified branding and content, the alliance would enable seamless collaboration across client’s different business units to boost both productivity while also reducing costs.

According to Canva’s own research, over 90 percent of employers now expect their employees to have design skills and knowledge, with visual communication having become “the status quo across every industry and profession.”

“We’re very excited to be entering into this Australian-first alliance,” said Deloitte CEO Adam Powick. “The enterprise landscape is more complex than ever with productivity pressures and technology advances in key areas like GenAI. In this environment, business leaders need to rethink how their teams work, collaborate, and communicate to get the full benefits of new technology.”

Canva is one of Australia’s greatest modern success stories, achieving unicorn status (a market valuation of $1 billion) just five years after its 2013 founding by CEO-COO couple Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht alongside chief product officer Cameron Adams. Canva has been widely praised for simplifying the design process, and now attracts almost 200 million active users worldwide.

Among those active users, according to Powick, are the teams from Deloitte, with the firm noting that while Canva has a well-established reputation for empowering SMEs and individuals through greater accessibility to easy-to-use design tools, the single-solution platform is now increasingly supporting larger organisations such as itself to their meet business objectives and client needs.

“We’re proud to be partnering with Deloitte to accelerate our mission,” Obrecht said. “Empowering organisations to succeed in this increasingly visual world means equipping them with the latest technology and ways of working. We’re looking forward to working with Deloitte to help teams supercharge their productivity and growth across the enterprise content life-cycle.”