The IPO Clock Is Ticking, and Canva Is Watching
Figma’s move toward a public offering is doing something subtle but consequential: it is forcing the market to put a number on collaborative design software in a way that has not happened before. Every roadshow conversation, every investor deck, every analyst model built around Figma’s revenue multiples becomes an implicit benchmark – and Canva, still private, still sitting on a valuation last pegged around $26 billion during its 2021 funding round, has no clean way to respond. When a direct competitor steps into the public light, it drags every comparable company into the same conversation, whether they want to be there or not.
The timing matters. Figma’s path to an IPO comes after Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition attempt collapsed under antitrust pressure in late 2023, a failure that left Figma flush with a $1 billion breakup fee but suddenly in need of a new growth narrative. Going public is that narrative. And the story Figma tells investors about its addressable market, its enterprise penetration, and its annual recurring revenue will set the terms that analysts then use to grade Canva’s private valuation against reality.
How Valuation Narratives Actually Get Written
Private companies control their own stories right up until the moment a public comparable makes that impossible. Before Figma’s IPO preparations became serious, Canva could point to its user count – over 170 million as of recent company statements – its profitability milestone, and its expansion into enterprise and AI-assisted design as evidence that its valuation held. Those metrics are real. The problem is that public markets do not value companies on metrics alone; they value them on multiples, and multiples are set by what comparable public companies are actually trading at.
Figma filing for an IPO gives Wall Street exactly the reference point it has been missing. Once Figma’s S-1 is public, investors will see its revenue, its growth rate, its gross margins, and its net revenue retention figures. Those numbers will immediately become the denominator in every ratio applied to Canva. If Figma trades at, say, twelve times forward revenue and Canva was last valued at a figure implying a much higher multiple relative to its own revenue run rate, the private market math starts to look uncomfortable.
Canva’s profitability claim does give it a card that many SaaS companies cannot play. Reaching cash-flow positivity without going public is genuinely rare in the design software space, and it means Canva is not burning toward insolvency while it waits. But profitability at scale and profitability as a justification for a premium valuation are different arguments. A company earning a modest margin on $2 billion in revenue occupies a different valuation bracket than one growing at 40 percent annually with expanding enterprise contracts – and Figma’s IPO will clarify exactly which bracket the market is prepared to pay for.
There is also a product positioning tension that the IPO process will surface. Figma built its identity around professional product and UX design – the tool that design teams at Airbnb, Microsoft, and Stripe use to build digital products. Canva built its identity around accessibility – design for everyone, from small businesses to social media managers to school teachers. These are not the same market, but as both companies expand upmarket into enterprise, they are increasingly fishing in the same waters. Figma’s S-1 will describe its enterprise motion in detail, and that description will force a public conversation about where exactly Canva fits by comparison.
Canva’s Enterprise Bet Meets a Harder Audience
Canva has spent the past two years making visible moves toward enterprise – Teams plans, Brand Kit controls, approval workflows, integrations with tools like Salesforce and HubSpot. The pitch is that large companies need design capacity distributed across non-designer employees, and Canva is the platform built for that. It is a coherent argument, and the company has signed enterprise contracts to support it. The difficulty is that the enterprise design conversation has historically been Figma’s territory, and Figma is about to explain its version of that story to public market investors in exhaustive detail.
When Figma’s roadshow begins, the questions it will face – How sticky are enterprise accounts? What is the expansion revenue rate? How does AI affect pricing? – are the same questions a future Canva IPO or funding round would need to answer. Canva does not have to be in the room for those questions to reshape expectations around its business.
The Valuation Gap and What Comes Next
Canva’s $26 billion valuation was set during a period when private tech valuations ran well ahead of public market reality. Since then, the broader SaaS sector has repriced significantly. Companies that raised at thirty or forty times revenue in 2021 found themselves trading at eight to twelve times revenue by 2023 and 2024. Canva, having not raised since then, carries that older price tag into a market that has moved. Figma’s IPO, if it prices at a multiple consistent with current market conditions, will make that gap visible in a way no private funding round can obscure.
This does not mean Canva’s business is weaker than its valuation suggests – it may genuinely be worth the number, depending on growth rates and margins that are not fully public. What it means is that the narrative control Canva has maintained by staying private gets harder to hold. Once investors have a live, trading Figma to stare at every day, the question “what is Canva worth?” stops being rhetorical and starts requiring a specific, defensible answer.
Canva’s options are limited but not absent. It could accelerate its own IPO timeline to define its story before Figma sets the frame. It could announce a new funding round at a valuation that either confirms the $26 billion figure or quietly accepts a markdown. It could double down on metrics – users, revenue growth, enterprise logo count – that distinguish its story from Figma’s rather than allowing them to be judged on the same terms. What it cannot do is ignore the fact that Figma’s public offering is already writing part of Canva’s story, whether Canva participates in that writing or not. The question is not whether the benchmark gets set. The question is whether Canva likes what it says about them when it does.
