In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, to unpack how the intersection of technology and finance is shaping enterprise strategy. Verma shares why SingleStore is “on course” for the public markets, reflects on brand-building through the company’s partnership with golf Hall of Famer Padraig Harrington and connects that ethos to how SingleStore helps organizations fix struggling data “swings.” The discussion zeroes in on what’s next as Wall Street watches the AI infrastructure buildout: after chips and systems, the software and data layers set the pace for value creation.
Verma outlines why enterprises must modernize “brown” data estates into “green” ones to safely bring corporate context, governance and compliance into LLM workflows via RAG – and why commoditized data-at-rest puts the advantage at the query layer that unifies data in motion with data at rest. He predicts agentic AI will gain reasoning capabilities in roughly 18 months, cites industry indicators like Google reporting ~25% of its software now built by AI and argues that high switching costs will give way to disruption as buyers reassess legacy vendors. The conversation closes with concrete momentum: ~33% YoY growth, ARR in the ~$135M range, gross dollar retention ~98%, cloud NDR ~130, ~50% of business now in the cloud, landing ~3 new customers per day, a path to cash-flow breakeven in the next two quarters and a teaser for AI-related announcements in the next two months. Listeners will find notable stats, real-world use cases and forward-looking views on how databases power reliable AI at enterprise scale.
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Cameron Adams, Canva
In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, to unpack how the intersection of technology and finance is shaping enterprise strategy. Verma shares why SingleStore is “on course” for the public markets, reflects on brand-building through the company’s partnership with golf Hall of Famer Padraig Harrington and connects that ethos to how SingleStore helps organizations fix struggling data “swings.” The discussion zeroes in on what’s next as Wall Street watches the AI infrastructure buildout: after chips and systems, the software and data layers set the pace for value creation.
Verma outlines why enterprises must modernize “brown” data estates into “green” ones to safely bring corporate context, governance and compliance into LLM workflows via RAG – and why commoditized data-at-rest puts the advantage at the query layer that unifies data in motion with data at rest. He predicts agentic AI will gain reasoning capabilities in roughly 18 months, cites industry indicators like Google reporting ~25% of its software now built by AI and argues that high switching costs will give way to disruption as buyers reassess legacy vendors. The conversation closes with concrete momentum: ~33% YoY growth, ARR in the ~$135M range, gross dollar retention ~98%, cloud NDR ~130, ~50% of business now in the cloud, landing ~3 new customers per day, a path to cash-flow breakeven in the next two quarters and a teaser for AI-related announcements in the next two months. Listeners will find notable stats, real-world use cases and forward-looking views on how databases power reliable AI at enterprise scale.
play_circle_outlineMagic Layers: Canva’s Foundation Model Converts Flat Images into Editable Layers for Human-AI Collaboration on Typos, Colors, Design
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play_circle_outlineMagic Layers rolling out in public beta, English-first with progressive international rollout.
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play_circle_outlineCanva’s Design Agents and Creative OS: Acquisitions, AI Scale, Enterprise Momentum, and a Data Moat
In this interview from theCUBE's Mixture of Experts series at the NYSE Wired Studio, Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer at Canva, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how the company is evolving from a design platform into a full-scale creative operating system powered by its own AI foundation models. Adams unveils Magic Layers, a new feature in public beta that uses Canva's proprietary design model to decompose any flat image into editable components — text, imagery and individual elements — solving a persistent frustration where AI-gener...Read more
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How does Canva’s new Magic Layers feature work, and why does the company believe it will help accelerate Canva’s growth given limitations of current AI outputs?add
Is the new Canva feature available now (in public beta), and will it let users upload any PNG/JPEG (including AI-generated or old files) from their drives to edit and localize the text for different markets?add
How have recent AI acquisitions, model integrations, and partnerships transformed Canva’s product positioning, capabilities, and business (including metrics, workflows/agents, and the platform vs. tool strategy)?add
>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's studio here in New York Stock Exchange. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is our mixture of expert series, part of the NYSE Wired program and community where we break down with the leaders, what the state of the art is in terms of building product, executing in the AI. Cameron Adams is here, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva. Very successful product. A lot of people are using it, millions and millions of people. Cameron, great to see you. Thanks for coming into our studio.
Cameron Adams
>> It is so good to be here, John. I'm itching to hear the bell ring.
John Furrier
>> I've heard the origination story of Canva from Bill Tai and Lars and many other folks. It's just a really kind of a great serendipitous story around the community coming together. And that's kind of cool, but the real story to me is just the rapid growth of having a really good product market fit. Okay, so you hit that. Canva is huge product, huge success. But now, that was pre-AI in the hype cycle, but now as AI becomes kind of the key enabler, this is where we're starting to see people really accelerate if they've done the work. You guys got some big news out. You got an event here in New York City. All the luminaries are there. You guys are leading the way and kind of sequencing from the product market fit on the user side. Now, expanding in the aperture for more capability, some call it the creative suite kind of platform. Talk about the news first, and I want to get into some of the platform side, but you got the news come out. Share the hard news.
Cameron Adams
>> Well, I think you said it right. AI is a huge opportunity to continue accelerating for the right companies. And our new launch of Magic Layers is an exact reason for why Canva is continuing to accelerate as well. I think we all know that AI outputs are kind of a dead end. Like you generate something, it's not quite right, but there's nothing you can really do about it. You might need to re-prompt it. It might change it. There still might be a typo in it. You need to fix it, but you can't do that. And the new Magic Layers feature from Canva lets you take any image, flat, plain image, bring it into Canva, and it immediately makes it editable. So it's actually backed by our new Canva design model, which is our own foundation model. And it enables any image to be decomposed into its text, into its image elements. And then you can type, you can edit, you can move things around, you can change colors. It's all open.
John Furrier
>> The best part of this AI wave now that we're a few years in is that it is magic. When you're playing with the foundation models, you type in stuff, "Wow, that's really good." It's getting better and better. On the image side, we've all kind of been there. I mean, I use image creation all the time. I try to incorporate it into docs and it's good, but it's not great. There's a typo and it's hard to break it apart. It's stuck. I think the idea of understanding that piece, explain how that changes with Magic Layers because you're saying you can now unpack that. So you get some images and you can map in. Did I get that right?
Cameron Adams
>> You're exactly right. So I mean, we're all familiar with text in AI and like talking to an LLM to get some text out of it, and it's quite easy to edit text. You can just take it into anything and start editing it. Images are totally different beast and designs even more so because designs are really complicated images with multiple layers in them and multiple messages that you're trying to send. So being able to now bring that into Canva and treat images as if they're editable outputs is a leapfrog. And I think it's really valuable in the age of AI because we're really looking at human machine collaboration. And stuff like Magic Layers enables that collaboration on steroids.
John Furrier
>> So this is a design platform. I want to ask you about the news before we move on to the platform. What's the availability? What is the status? Beta, is it shipping? Is it going to be available to everyone? What's just some of the stats?
Cameron Adams
>> So it's rolling out in public beta right now. Most of your audience will be able to access it. It's in English first and international is a huge part of Canva's user base. So we'll be rolling that out progressively. You can bring any ping image, any JPEG that you have, anything that's AI generated or anything that you've got sitting around on your cloud drive or on your hard drive. We often see people with really old designs that they don't have access to anymore. And they can now bring those images straight into Canva and start editing them.
John Furrier
>> That's a good use case right there. Bring old stuff in, bring it back to life.
Cameron Adams
>> Yeah, it's amazing. And you can change the text, you can localize it to different markets. So something that might have been for your English market that you want to take to Mexico or Indonesia, you can just bring that in and change it for that market.
John Furrier
>> All right. Let's talk about some of the things. One of the things you guys have recently done, you had two acquisitions recently, but two years ago, I think it was a seminal moment with Leonardo as a platform. You were using AI as a customer and then transitioned to having your own model engine.
Cameron Adams
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Talk about that and what that created for the product.
Cameron Adams
>> Leonardo was an amazing acquisition for us. And the team after joining Canva have severely influenced our AI roadmap. So if you don't know, Leonardo was or still is a foundational image model creator and we managed to bring that model into Canva. Their team have some of the best researchers in the world, particularly for visual AI. And their core team have come into our research team, managed to bolster it with ideas, experience. We now have over 100 researchers in our AI research team, and that's led to breakthroughs like the Canva design model, which is the world's first complete design model that allows you to generate and edit and do it all through an AI workflow.
John Furrier
>> So you guys can control your own destiny in the product side. Add to it, you had the MangoAI and Cavalry recently last month, I believe. What does that do to the mix?
Cameron Adams
>> Yeah, we've been doing a bunch of AI acquisitions over the last year to really bolster both our internal models and our interface with external models like ChatGPT and Claude. MagicBrief was also an acquisition we did last year, which really speaks to AI automation. So that enables you to go from absolute zero to a full marketing campaign with a click of a few buttons, and that's entirely enabled by AI.
John Furrier
>> And we're entering the creative era. What I love about these new technologies, especially on the product side, I wanted to highlight that platform and the acquisitions because you did the work, now you're kind of harvesting and bearing some fruit from that benefit, but also there's a market shift. I mean, pre-AI, there was tools out there. Now, we're in the middle of this AI-enabled, AI-native era. What's the biggest changeover that people are seeing, the creators? Because now, you guys are well known for your ease of use, huge fans. Our team here loves, we all use Canva. What's the biggest change pre, before and after that kind of threshold of the AI era?
Cameron Adams
>> So I mean, we're an incredibly product led company. It is all about the user experience and really helping them achieve the goal that they came to Canva for. 15 years ago when we started Canva, it was about being great on a mobile device or in your web browser. And we use the latest technology to empower you to design, to create amazing pitch decks, amazing marketing materials, and create success for your business. Of course, technology changes and AI has come in now, and we say AI as a continuation of that mission. How do we empower more people to design with higher quality in faster time? And AI lets you do that. It like totally blows open your workflows, enables you to ideate faster, come up with better materials and do so in even faster times.
John Furrier
>> Okay. So you guys that were a design tool that had some AI in it. Now, you're an AI design tool platform. Talk about the positioning and the growth strategies. Now, you still have relationships with a lot of the frontier models. Talk about where you guys are now from a positioning standpoint and where you see the growth and the product side.
Cameron Adams
>> Yeah. So I think now, we have become the premier Visual AI platform and we've integrated really closely with OpenAI, with Anthropic, and they've been really great partners, honestly. They're continuing to innovate. They've become an amazing channel for us. We now get an amazing number of new Canva users from both ChatGPT and Claude. Actually, we've had 26 million ChatGPT conversations that have brought Canva into the fold. So it's a really great partnership, I think, and they're relying on us to be that visual AI platform, to be visual content that they can get their users over to and that they can iterate with. So through both Claude and ChatGPT, you can use Canva using our MCP servers to create amazing pitch decks, to iterate on them directly within Claude or ChatGPT. And then when you need to get really deep, maybe bring your brand in, bring your other visual content in, you can skip that over to Canva and continue editing it there.
John Furrier
>> What also you're teasing out is the success you guys had, and I'd love to speak to some of the momentum on any numbers you can share on the user side. But when you start talking about automation, MCP, that brings in workflows. That opens up enterprise, that opens up solo entrepreneurs, creatives. That opens up a whole nother aperture. Talk about that transition, how you see that because you have a great business. I mean, you can share some of the numbers if you can. I don't know what the numbers are. Billions in revenue and you got hundreds of millions of users, but now you're talking about automation.
Cameron Adams
>> We're doing $4 billion in annualized revenue now, and that continues to grow year-on-year. Actually, our enterprise revenue growth has grown by over 100% for the last two years. So that kind of speaks, I think, to the value that businesses and enterprises are seeing in creating amazing visual content and doing so through an AI workflow. We've now had over 27 billion uses of our AI products. So through the integrations that we've done and the core models that we've built, people are seeing the value for that. I think what you're talking about in terms of workflows is incredibly important as well. So people are now moving beyond assets and thinking about the bigger goals that they want to achieve. And the Canva Grow product, which we launched last October, which is directly for marketers to have a better workflow, is a really great example of that.
John Furrier
>> I can't not do an interview these days without mentioning agents, but agents really are as a good tailwind for Canva given some of these just mentioned, just riffing with you real time. I mean, I could see some of these workflows and agents doing really strong work. What's your vision on agents? How does that fit into the mix? Because I could be a solo marketing department doing some shadow AI work and saying, "Hey, we use those other things, but look what I just did."
Cameron Adams
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> And spin up some agents and saying, "Wait a minute, that used to take six months. Now that's six hours, six days, depending upon the task." We're seeing that velocity value creation. What's your thoughts on agents? How do you see it playing out?
Cameron Adams
>> You know exactly where it's going. And I think agents are an incredible innovation that I think people are still grappling with. Even on the technology side, we're still figuring out how agents work, how they integrate into people's workflows and how to make them effective within these huge systems that already exist. Canva Grow is an awesome example of an agentic future. So with Canva Grow, you can put in one product link and we will go and create all the marketing assets that you need for that. We'll figure out the text lines you need. We'll figure out the imagery you need. We'll assemble that into a marketing asset that you can send out to Instagram or to LinkedIn, and it does it all agentically. The future of that is having that always on. So something that's sitting there recommending things to you for how your marketing can be improved, how your campaign can be optimized, and that's where Canva Grow is building to. I'll just mention that we have a huge event coming up in April in just a month's time, and we might have a little news in the kind of broader design agents.
John Furrier
>> Little teaser, huh?
Cameron Adams
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> Little teaser. Well, I mean, I think first of all, you guys have a first principle of reducing friction, making things easy to use. I mean, a lot of people are looking at, I won't say clues you with agents right now, but people are working through some of the grinding out, what's the compliance, what are some of those things. That stuff has to be worked out. I mean, you don't want to have an agent cause more problems.
Cameron Adams
>> No, there's still a ton to be figured out, but I think the leading companies are really pushing the forefront of what it's capable with and experimenting, I think, in a really responsible way. You need to have some of your staff trying new things out, innovating and pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
John Furrier
>> Cameron, one of the things I love about what you guys have done is you have such success at scale. You mentioned some of the stats on the billions of things you guys are doing and activities. A lot of the AI era is causing a lot of what I call the AWS metaphor. People use it, it's easy to use, then it gets bigger. They have more data and they get more usage around. They can see things that users are doing. What are some of the things you guys are doing, because you have an at scale positions, kind of a rarefied AI position? What are you guys looking at when you look at the platform? You have tons of data and I'm sure you guys have your own AI platform and design tool, but what are you guys gleaning out of that data? What's the value you're turning that into from a productization standpoint?
Cameron Adams
>> So we've now got 265 million people that use Canva every single month. So it's a massive audience and we really focus on delivering each of those users a really personalized design experience. So they need to be able to bring their brand into their designs. They need to bring their guidelines in. They need to be able to collaborate with their team and all stay on the same message. Being able to weave that into our AI models is seriously one of the powers of Canva. And it's one of our biggest moats as well, because nowhere else integrates all of your visual content, all of your brand and all of your guidelines into a visual creation engine that allows you to put out a marketing campaign in file.
John Furrier
>> And that translates into value for the creators, that collective intelligence, that data.
Cameron Adams
>> And we're seeing that through the growth of our users and the growth of our revenue.
John Furrier
>> I have to ask, because I'm smirking because I see this argument all the time. That's a tool versus a platform. Talk about that notion, because you guys aren't a tool. You're a platform. You just mentioned some of the things we just were talking about the platform side of it. You mentioned the data you're getting, you're at scale. What should people know about when they think about this AI era? Tools can be platforms. And talk about that, because you guys aren't a tool. I mean, you're technically a tool if you're going to do some work here and there, but you have such a spectrum of value and headroom for the creators and enterprises. What does that debate or discussion mean to you, platforms versus tools?
Cameron Adams
>> We actually call it the creative operating system, because it encompasses so much of people's workflow and their ability to push out content and achieve their goals. Whether that's creating a deck or it's creating marketing materials or it's creating amazing videos that go out to your audience. It's a complete operating system that operates across content, across AI and our in-house Canva design model. And at what we call our platform layer, which is all of our brand management, content management, everything that goes on under the hood of a design. And those three layers form this creative operating system that 265 million people are using and it's the only place they can come to get that.
John Furrier
>> As the co-founder and chief product officer, you have two perspectives, one, founder. So you're there, you're president of creation. So loved when founders still active and driving all the businesses. I'm a big fan of that, staying around, people know that. But also, as a product, chief product, you have the keys to the kingdom. You got to manage the product build and the customer requirements, classic product management kind of thesis. But in the age of AI, it's so fast, how do you evaluate? Take us through your mindset of how you make priorities on the product. Take us through the thought process there.
Cameron Adams
>> We're always thinking about how do we deliver more user value. And honestly, now is an amazing time to be voting product, because there's so much user value that you can unlock in such a short space of time. We've got great foundations for how to do that. We've been working with AI and ML for over 12 years now and the research team that we've managed to build inside Canva off the back of that enables us to move extremely quickly in the AI age. Coupled with our traditional product building expertise, it creates a killer combination. So we're seeing ideas come out of our designers and our product managers daily and being able to get those into production in the matter of weeks is a brilliant time to be building
John Furrier
>> I know this is tough to question to ask because no one likes to pick their favorite child, but what's the coolest thing you've done?
Cameron Adams
>> That is one of my 25 children. Honestly, I think the latest release Magic Layers is an incredible step forward because it's an innovation no one else has. And it builds upon those incredible AI foundations that we've got with the Canva design model. So I think you'll increasingly see more AI innovation coming out of Canva and truly unique visual AI that no one else is doing.
John Furrier
>> And the problem that that solves, what's the heart, what's the crosshairs? What's the bullseye? What is the core problem that that solves?
Cameron Adams
>> Bullseye there is that we're not seeing the ability to collaborate with AI that we need with visual content. It's stuck in these boxes. You can't change the color, you can't fix the typo as you were kind of mentioning. And being able to just get in there and work alongside your AI partner, help have it generate your initial idea, you'd be able to take that and go the last mile that you need to within your design. That's the essential use case we're hitting with Magic Layers.
John Furrier
>> Final question is, we're living in an imagination era, human in the loop. Creativity is a superpower. AI scales intellect, scales creativity. That's clearly coming out of what we're seeing. Yeah, some good jobs go away, but actually other jobs become turbocharged. What does that era look like? If you could look down that path as the future unfolds, you're going to have a fully integrated creative suite, you got all these new tools and the platform there. What does that future look like for you?
Cameron Adams
>> We talked a lot about the imagination era at our last big event in October, and we truly believe that helping people bring their imagination to life is one of the most powerful things that we can do and also one of the most powerful things that they can do. So many people have an idea for a business or a charity or some way that they want to impact the world. And we have seen so many stories of people using Canva to create designs and content that enable them to do that. So using AI, using Canva as a productivity tool, using it as a visual content creation tool, we have seen so many amazing examples of impact in the world through that.
John Furrier
>> Final quick question before the bell rings opening bell here at the NYSE. What is the partner equation? How do people partner with Canva?
Cameron Adams
>> They can jump onto Canva.com. We've got a great browser app. We've also got great mobile apps and it's super simple to get quickly started, set up your brand, drop in some content that you've already got and have a created design for you.
John Furrier
>> Cover your ears. Cover your ears. Three, two, one. Here we go. Okay. I will wrap it up. All right, Cameron, congratulations and thanks for coming into theCUBE here at the NYSE Wired Studio. As with those kinds of performance numbers, we're here at Wall Street. IPO in the future?
Cameron Adams
>> Definitely an IPO in the future when it happens. We're still not in a rush. I think we've got amazing figures, four billion annualized revenue, 265 million people using it, and that just continues to grow. And I think when we do IPO, it's going to be a big moment.
John Furrier
>> And the platform, and you get the data moat, you get the collective intelligence, a huge growing base, enterprise, congratulations. Thanks for coming in.
Cameron Adams
>> Thank you.
John Furrier
>> I really appreciate it. Cameron Adams, the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva, huge success and really the playbook for how to execute product-led growth in the modern era, build the platform, get your own AI, work with all the tools and all the partners. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier