Who are Canva's decision-makers?

Canva's three co-founders still run it. Melanie Perkins is CEO; she and Cliff Obrecht (COO) previously built Fusion Books, Australia's largest school-yearbook business, which became the template for Canva's accessible-design thesis. Cameron Adams, the CPO, was a designer at Google (Google Wave) before joining.

The executive bench has professionalized for scale and a likely IPO. Kelly Steckelberg, formerly CFO of Zoom (where she ran its IPO), joined as CFO in November 2024, succeeding Damien Singh. After 12-year CTO Brendan Humphreys stepped down in June 2026, his deputy Simon Newton (ex-Google, ex-Uber) took over the global technology organization as Head of Technology rather than as a direct CTO replacement.

Strategy and the biggest bets sit with the founders — Perkins on company direction, Obrecht on operations and corporate development (he drove the Affinity and Leonardo.ai deals), and Adams on product. But day-to-day purchasing is owned by functional leaders, not the founders.

For finance, ERP, audit and IPO-readiness tooling, CFO Kelly Steckelberg's org owns the budget. For infrastructure, developer tooling, security and data platforms, the technology organization under Simon Newton is the buyer. Marketing, sales/GTM, and people-ops leaders own their respective stacks. Expect a buying committee, not a single signer, on any meaningful deal — and expect more procurement rigor as the company readies for public markets.

Canva runs as a product-led organization of roughly 5,500+ people centered in Sydney, with large hubs in Manila and Austin and a globally distributed remote workforce. Engineering is structured around microservices and product groups, and AI (Magic Studio, the Leonardo.ai team) is now a cross-cutting priority.

The 2026 US redomicile, the new CFO, and a wave of senior departures and reshuffles (including the long-serving CTO) signal a deliberate shift from founder-run startup toward a public-company operating model — with more formal finance, legal, security, and IR functions standing up. For sellers, that means the next 12–18 months are an unusually active window for new vendor decisions.