How Canva rolled out GenAI to its workforce

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys explains why culture is as important to a GenAI rollout as the tools themselves, Elon Musk finds another way to troll Sam Altman, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.

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Only I didn't say fudge

Canva has been working in and around AI and machine learning over the last eight years while building out its flagship product, according to CTO Brendan Humphreys, but the company took a much more measured approach to adopting generative AI for internal purposes after ChatGPT hit the scene in late 2022. In the end, spending a little more money to give employees a chance to try a variety of tools seems to have done the trick.

"We've been playing with vendor tooling space for maybe two years, but we've really only reached an assessment that now is the time to roll these tools out at scale in the last six months," Humphreys said in a recent interview with Runtime. "The early versions of these tools were … you can see the power behind them but they were a little bit gimmicky and quite limited in their applicability."

• Companies selling generative AI over the last two years really did themselves a disservice through comical applications of hype and FUD in their rollout strategies.
• "However, our assessment is that there is real disruptive change here that we can't ignore, and we are working very hard internally to help our engineers adopt AI as an accelerant, as a superpower that they can employ to increase their efficiency," Humphreys said.
• Canva spent "perhaps more than I'd like to" in order to license similar types of tools from a number of different vendors, he said, and it took a long time before the company found most of those tools suitable for its needs.
• Most of that investment went toward coding tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, but Canva also encouraged employees to use ChatGPT as a personal assistant.

Canva's strategy touches on an important shift that is underway in SaaS: the introduction of consumption-based pricing. Traditional SaaS licenses charge customers based on the number of people that need access to the product, but that approach is starting to look outdated.

• Companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow are introducing consumption-based pricing as they release products based around agentic AI.
• "I think that the market currently is saturated, and it seems there are new entrants every day. And I think that consumption-based pricing is a competitive advantage in that market," Humphreys said.
• Canva has convinced some vendors using traditional per-seat licenses to give it some flexibility, but it sounds like companies that are struggling to sell generative AI tools the old-fashioned per-seat licensing way — such as Google and Microsoft — might find more success from a consumption-based approach as opposed to forcing generative AI features down every user's throat.

In its early days, cloud computing was very much a grassroots phenomenon; engineers with credit cards were spinning up cloud servers to try out new features or side projects, and business departments found new SaaS tools much more flexible and user-friendly than older CRM or ERP suites. Right now inside a lot of companies, the generative AI experience has been almost completely the opposite thanks to management terrors about being left behind by another platform shift.

• Canva is trying it both ways; strongly encouraging its 5,000 employees (a little less than half of whom are developers) to use generative AI tools, but giving them the space and time to figure out how those tools work best for them.
• "We want people to be intrinsically motivated. We don't think, for this particular technology change, that extrinsic motivation works," Humphreys said.
• Instead, the goal is to show employees what's possible with generative AI tools and let them experience that "oh, fuck!" moment on their own when they stumble upon a feature that makes them more productive, he said.
• "I see my role as shepherding this technology into making sure that we have this positive cultural experience, and it really is a cultural shift for engineers," Humphreys said.

The clod couple

Sam Altman's quest to turn OpenAI from a research non-profit into a hyperglobalmegacorporation hit a snag Monday after a group of investors led by an increasingly haggard Elon Musk offered to buy the nonprofit portion of the company for $97.4 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported that the group's unsolicited offer was swiftly rejected by Altman, and OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor said "OpenAI is not for sale" during an event Tuesday.

But the problem is that in order to cash in, sell out, and bro down, Altman and OpenAI need to value the non-profit arm of the company at something in order to sell the non-profit's control of OpenAI to a for-profit venture, and $97.4 billion is way more than anybody was thinking. "The point here is not to buy OpenAI; the point is to raise the price. If the right valuation of the nonprofit’s stake in OpenAI is north of $100 billion, then that means that the nonprofit needs to get a bigger chunk of the company, which leaves less for the for-profit shareholders," as Matt Levine of Bloomberg put it in his newsletter.

When asked why he thought Musk made the bid, Altman said "I think it’s to slow down a competitor and catch up with his thing, but I don’t really know ... to the degree anybody does," according to CNBC. Sometimes two people just deserve each other.

Enterprise funding

QuEra raised $230 million in new funding to help the company build "large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers" that can run at room temperature, unlike the near-absolute zero temperatures that prototype quantum computers require.

Tines landed $125 million in Series C funding for its business-process and workflow builder, which uses AI and a company's data to get up and running.

Semgrep scored $100 million in Series D funding as it builds out a coding security platform for developers.

Sardine reeled in $70 million in Series C funding for its fraud prevention and compliance software.

Voyantis raised $41 million in new funding to help companies figure out how to retain their most valuable customers.

Moderne scored $30 million in Series B funding for its code-refactoring tool, which helps companies modernize older software with AI.

The Runtime roundup

Harness and Traceable, two developer-tools companies run by Jyoti Bansal, agreed to merge under the Harness brand.

Intel's data-center group suffered another blow Monday after Justin Hotard, who was executive vice president and general manager of the division, agreed to take the CEO job at Nokia.

Supermicro promised to release detailed financial results by the SEC-imposed deadline of Feb. 25 after delaying those reports following allegations of financial irregularities, while acknowledging that revenue will fall below expectations in fiscal 2025, which ends in June.

Freshworks beat Wall Street estimates for fourth-quarter revenue and profit and raised its full-year 2025 guidance.

Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!