Canva vs Cohere

By valuation, Canva is the larger company at $42B versus $7B — a 6x difference. Size can also be measured by team: Canva employs 7500 people while Cohere has 500 employees.

Cohere has raised more in total funding at $1.5B, compared to Canva's $589M — a gap of $951M. Combined, the two companies have completed 12 known funding rounds.

Canva leads with an Awaira Score of 95/100, while Cohere sits at 83/100. That 12-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Canva was founded by Melanie Perkins in 2013. Cohere was founded by Aidan Gomez in 2019. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Canva: Canva is an Australian graphic design platform founded in 2013 that enables users to create visual content without design experience. The company operates a web and mobile-based design tool offering templates, stock images, fonts, and design elements for creating presentations, social media graphics, documents, and marketing materials. Canva's core technology applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to power design suggestions, background removal, magic write features, and content generation capabilities. The platform serves individual creators, small businesses, and enterprises through freemium and subscription models. As of recent valuations, Canva reached $42 billion in valuation with $589 million in total funding, making it one of Australia's most valuable private technology companies. The company positions itself in the enterprise AI category, integrating AI-powered features to streamline design workflows and democratize professional-quality content creation. Canva competes against Adobe's Creative Cloud suite, Figma for collaborative design, and various specialized design tools. The platform has expanded internationally with millions of users globally and serves multiple industries including education, marketing, and business operations. Canva's growth trajectory reflects strong market demand for accessible design tools, driven by increasing content creation needs across digital channels and remote work adoption. Canva combines accessible design democratization with AI-powered features to address the enterprise content creation market at scale. Cohere: Cohere is a Canadian enterprise AI company founded in 2019 that develops large language models (LLMs) and generative AI solutions for business applications. The company provides API access to proprietary language models designed for tasks including text generation, semantic search, classification, and summarization. Cohere's platform enables enterprises to integrate advanced natural language processing capabilities into existing workflows without building AI infrastructure from scratch. The company positions itself in the competitive LLM market alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and other model developers, differentiating through enterprise-focused features, customization options, and emphasis on responsible AI deployment. Cohere's models power applications across customer service, content generation, document analysis, and knowledge management sectors. As of its Series D funding round, Cohere has raised $445 million in total funding, achieving a valuation of $5.5 billion. The company operates primarily in the cloud-based AI services space, offering both API-based access and custom model fine-tuning for enterprise clients. Notable adoption has emerged from financial services, technology, and professional services sectors, though specific customer names remain largely undisclosed in public statements. The company competes on technical capability, deployment flexibility, and enterprise support infrastructure rather than consumer brand recognition, reflecting its B2B strategic focus and positioning within the rapidly expanding generative AI market for institutional buyers. Cohere focuses exclusively on enterprise applications of language models rather than consumer-facing products, emphasizing customization and responsible deployment for institutional clients.

Canva got there first, launching in 2013 — that's 6 years of extra runway. Cohere didn't arrive until 2019. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Canva has about 7500 employees; Cohere has about 500. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Canva and Cohere compete in Enterprise AI, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.