Canva Inc. has acquired Serif Ltd., a company with a suite of graphic design applications used by more than 3 million customers. 

The deal was announced today. Canva co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Cliff Obrecht told Bloomberg that the transaction values U.K.-based Serif at “several” hundred million pounds.

Canva provides a cloud service that enables users without extensive graphic design know-how to create logos, brochures and other visual assets. The company reportedly generates over $2 billion in annual revenue from an installed base that comprises about 175 million users. More than half of those users signed up in the past year.

Serif, the company Canva has acquired, likewise competes in the creative software market. But it focuses on a different audience. Whereas Canva’s platform is mainly geared toward users with limited image editing experience, Serif sells software for professional designers.

The latter company’s product portfolio comprises three applications collectively known as the Affinity suite. They’re positioned as a more affordable alternative to Adobe Inc.’s creative applications. The suite is available through a onetime purchase, whereas Adobe products such as Photoshop require a subscription.

The first Affinity application, Affinity Designer, is geared toward creating vector graphics. Those are visual assets that designers don’t draw manually but rather assemble from geometric shapes such as polygons. Serif also sells Affinity Photo, for editing existing images, and a tool called Affinity Publisher that can combine multiple visual assets into a single file such as a webpage.

The Verge reported that Canva plans to continue offering the applications as standalone products. The deal could potentially enable it to more directly compete with Adobe. Many of the latter company’s creative applications, most notably Photoshop, are geared toward professional designers similarly to the Affinity suite.

Canva’s announcement of the acquisition comes a day after Adobe kicked off its annual Adobe Summit designer conference. At the event this morning, the company introduced a raft of updates to its creative software portfolio. One addition, a tool called GenStudio, could enable Adobe more directly to challenge Canva’s flagship design platform for users without extensive image editing experience.

GenStudio allows marketing teams to quickly create visual assets such as product images using generative artificial intelligence. According to Adobe, there’s also a feature that ensures newly created images adhere to a company’s design guidelines. GenStudio doubles as an analytics tool that can measure the effectiveness of the content users create.

At Adobe Summit today, the company also introduced AI enhancements to its Experience Cloud suite of marketing applications. One of the main additions is Experience Platform AI Assistant, a chatbot that can answer questions about ad campaigns and perform related actions. In conjunction, Adobe is rolling out tools that ease analytics tasks such as processing marketing data spread across multiple applications. 

Photo: Canva