Canva opens applications for its $50mn Developer Innovation Fund

Visual communication platform Canva on Monday announced the opening of applications for its $50 million Developers Innovation Fund to provide financial support and incentives to developers.

The Innovation Fund aims to reward developers who share Canva’s goal to democratise design and foster a diverse marketplace of free-to-use apps on Canva.

Canva’s goal is to create the most pluggable visual communications platform available by bringing every design and AI capability onto a single page.

“We’re thrilled to take this next step in nurturing our developer community and confident that this will make Canva a rewarding home for developers to bring their ideas to life, offering tremendous value to our users in the process,” Anwar Haneef, Head of Ecosystem at Canva, said in a statement.

The company launched the programme in June, and after that thousands of developers joined the Canva Developers Programme and have published 60 new apps using the Canva Apps SDK, which have collectively been used 15 million times, according to the company.

Canva will begin distributing the $50 million Innovation Fund in the form of — App Adoption Awards and Developer Grants.

App Adoption Awards is a one-time cash award for apps that reach adoption milestones, based on the number of monthly users.

These are open to all developers who have launched a free public app and meet specific requirements.

Developer Grants are cash grants, which could fund development, or subsidise computing costs, to help developers build free-to-use apps.

To be considered for a Developer Grant, developers can apply from now until March 2024.