Issuu

PROCUREMENT BEYOND PLAYBOOKS

Vinod Kumar on Leading with Curiosity, Clarity, and Courage at Canva

In a company where creativity and speed drive everything, from design to deployment, procurement must do more than keep up; it has to lead. As Technology Sourcing Lead at Canva, Vinod Kumar has embraced this challenge head on. With a background that spans luxury hospitality, banking, and tech, Vinod brings a rare mix of customer centricity, commercial insight, and operational sharpness to the world of technology procurement.

In this interview, he shares how Canva’s fast paced, collaborative culture shapes his sourcing strategy, how AI is already transforming the way procurement adds value, and why building authentic relationships across the business matters more than ever. From navigating SaaS complexities to enabling scale through smart vendor partnerships, Vinod offers a grounded yet future focused perspective on what it really takes to lead procurement in one of the world’s most dynamic tech companies.

Career Journey

Can you share your career path and what led you to your current role as Technology Sourcing Lead at Canva? What experiences have most influenced your approach to technology procurement?

I started my career in luxury hospitality, working across India, the Middle East, and on cruise lines, an experience that instilled in me a deep focus on customer centricity, cost consciousness, and operational excellence. After a decade, I moved to Australia with the goal of transitioning into the corporate world. I joined one of the country’s largest banks to help transform its Corporate Services team.

That role led me to manage an accelerated supplier consolidation program following a major M&A, and eventually into technology procurement after navigating a particularly challenging software audit. Since then, I’ve led complex negotiations with major software vendors, service integrators, and cloud providers, always with a focus on creating long term value.

Looking back, three key experiences have shaped my procurement approach. Hospitality taught me to always put the customer first. That principle now guides how I design procurement processes— building everything around what internal users truly need, while aligning with the company’s broader strategy. I’ve also learned that success in procurement isn’t about squeezing vendors; it’s about understanding usage patterns and unlocking real ROI. And finally, working at Canva has shown me how essential it is to stay tech savvy and market aware. In a fast growing tech company, procurement must enable innovation, not slow it down.

Why Canva

What attracted you to Canva?

I wanted to join a company that moves fast, solves meaningful problems, and gives me the freedom to truly own my work. Canva delivered on all of that—and more.

The first thing that drew me in was the culture. It’s young, dynamic, and deeply collaborative. Everyone thinks like a founder—bold, curious, and unafraid to challenge the status quo. There’s no red tape and no sacred cows. We set a high bar, celebrate wins loudly, and always push for progress over perfection.

That mindset is matched by the scale of what we’re building. Over 2430 million people use Canva each month, with more than 35 billion designs created to date. We’re also one of the top AI design platforms globally—our AI tools have already been used over 18 billion times. As Canva expands into the Enterprise space—with customers like Salesforce, DocuSign, and eXp Realty embracing Canva Enterprise —we’re tackling even more complex and impactful challenges.

From a procurement perspective, that means operating at the intersection of velocity, innovation, and real impact. We’re not just ticking boxes—we’re helping shape the future of how people design, collaborate, and create. That’s what makes coming to work every day genuinely exciting.

CANVA ACCELERATES DATA DRIVEN DECISION

MAKING

With the Snowflake Platform and AI Data Cloud

Canva has come a long way from its humble beginnings in Perth, Western Australia. Since its launch in 2013, Canva has established itself as the leading visual communication platform now serving more than 240 million monthly active users and generating more than USD$3 billion in annualised revenue.

Central to this success is a strong culture of data-informed decision-making.

Data is integral to smart decision-making across the organisation, from individual feature launches to executive strategy and development.

However, Canva’s data architecture wasn’t always optimised to support rapid growth. In its early stages, analytics and AI/ML workloads often required switching between multiple platforms to complete tasks, making the process complex and time-consuming. By leveraging Snowflake’s ML capabilities, it has been able to reduce this complexity and streamline certain workflows.

To achieve its mission of empowering the world to design, Canva needed to consolidate data management and utilisation into a single, highly scalable solution.

Through an evaluation, Canva determined the Snowflake platform and AI Data Cloud delivered reliability, flexibility and functionality. It was also easy to use and could grow to support Canva’s flourishing business.

The Snowflake product roadmap also incorporated a range of AI-powered features that could help Canva maximise the value of data to marketing and other functions across the business.

Having quickly built trust internally in the Snowflake platform and AI Data Cloud, Canva now uses a range of Snowflake features to accelerate global growth and product velocity. These include Snowpipe for real-time data ingestion and Cortex AI for business-to-business lead routing.

MAKING SENSE OF FAST GROWING VOLUMES OF DATA

With Snowflake, Canva established a scalable data architecture that supported the business’s appetite for innovation. The platform and AI Data Cloud enabled Canva to continue making sense of data as it increased in volume and complexity. At the same time, the business was able to maintain the efficiency and performance of its systems.

Canva is now poised to push the boundaries of AI and analytics with the Snowflake platform and AI Data Cloud. This means using Snowflake to tackle bigger questions at a lower cost, address more complex problems faster, and answer questions with greater certainty.

To meet these challenges, Canva is testing a range of Snowflake AI capabilities, including Cortex Analyst, a managed, LLM-powered Snowflake Cortex feature that enables organisations to create applications that answer questions based on structured data in the Snowflake platform.

SCALE THOUSANDS OF ADS FASTER WITH SNOWFLAKE

Canva is particularly excited about the opportunities presented by Cortex AISQL to use natural language in SQL queries. With the AI_CLASSIFY function, the business can understand core messages, classify calls to action and identify how visually engaging an ad is, all in a few lines of SQL. According to Canva team members, early signs are that the business can understand and scale thousands of ads faster.

These innovations build on a range of rich use cases enabled by the Snowflake platform and AI Data Cloud at Canva. For example, the business is using Snowflake to optimise B2B sales and marketing activities, including lead routing, scoring and attribution. With this robust data foundation, the business has expanded from serving primarily individual creators to delivering an enterprise-grade solution, Canva Enterprise, that services companies such as Salesforce, HP Inc. and Expedia.

POWERING A FEATURE RICH ROADMAP

The Snowflake platform and AI Data Cloud also enable Canva to validate development at scale, accelerating the delivery of features and enhancements to its hundreds of millions of users. This data-driven approach powers an extensive roadmap for the development of products such as the recently launched Canva Sheets, a visual-first spreadsheet.

Data flowing through Snowflake from Google Analytics and other sources provides rich insights into user behaviour and preferences that inform Canva’s product development process.

Meanwhile, the unified view of user data provided by Snowflake provides Canva with a better understanding of individual preferences, enabling the development of powerful personalisation features. These include AI-powered design style recommendations that suggest colours, fonts and layouts based on users’ previous behaviours and design preferences.

MAXIMISING MARKETING ROI

In addition, the Snowflake platform and AI Data Cloud empower Canva to maximise marketing return on investment by optimising marketing spend across a range of channels. With these analytics capabilities, Canva can access the insights to reach, engage and adapt campaigns and assets for local markets.

Further, analysing user data with Snowflake through AI and integrations with Claude, Llama and OpenAI enable more granular customer segmentation. With this enhanced understanding, Canva can deliver more relevant and personalised experiences to business customers.

A reliable, AI-powered data foundation is crucial for Canva to understand its users and make informed decisions about adding new capabilities to its visual communication platform.

Technology Procurement Strategy

As the Technology Sourcing Lead, how do you align Canva’s technology procurement strategies with the company’s mission to empower everyone to design?

Canva’s mission is to empower everyone to design and that means technology procurement can’t become a roadblock to innovation.

Our strategy is straightforward: be a trusted partner, understand what teams actually need, and then step back, while keeping the right guardrails in place.

We take a growth-first approach. We’re not just negotiating for today; we’re planning for the millions more people who will use Canva tomorrow. That means building flexible, scalable agreements that won’t hold us back as we grow.

Second, we aim to make procurement as seamless as possible. While some friction is inevitable in a fast-moving environment, our goal is to eliminate unnecessary hurdles. We’ve simplified approvals and created frameworks that empower teams to make swift, sound decisions.

Finally, we prioritise real partnerships not just vendor relationships. We look for partners who share our values and vision. In some cases, we’ve even invested in these partnerships because we believe in their long-term potential.

At Canva, procurement is a catalyst, not a blocker. My role is to ensure our teams have what they need to keep pushing forward—so anyone, anywhere, can design with ease.

SaaS Procurement Challenges

Given Canva’s extensive use of SaaS solutions, what are the primary challenges you face in SaaS procurement, and how do you address them to ensure optimal value and compliance?

As a born-in-the-cloud company, SaaS has always powered the way we work—giving our teams instant scalability and access to world-class tools. But after a decade of rapid growth, we’ve also learned that the convenience of SaaS comes with its own set of challenges, particularly around cost visibility and control.

AI-driven and usage-based pricing models make forecasting difficult. SaaS and cloud costs are becoming increasingly intertwined. And with every team able to spin up their own tools, fragmentation and security risks begin to scale quickly.

We’ve addressed this by focusing on volume right-sizing, buying only what we need, when we need it—and by building a strong Cloud FinOps capability that helps us surface the true cost of our technology decisions.

Our engineering culture is also a major strength. We know what good looks like and use that expertise to negotiate better deals. On the compliance side, we work closely with our Security-Trust and Legal teams, using automation and proactive risk assessments to stay ahead of potential issues. SaaS isn’t going anywhere but getting the most out of it means treating it like a strategic investment, not just a convenience.

Canva Accelerates Data-Driven Decision Making

with the Snowﬂake Platform and AI Data Cloud

Central to this success is a strong culture of data-informed decision-making.

Data is integral to smart decision-making across the organisation, from individual feature launches to executive strategy and development.

However, Canva’s data architecture wasn’t always optimised to support rapid growth. In its early stages, analytics and AI/ML workloads often required switching between multiple platforms to complete tasks, making the process complex and time-consuming. By leveraging Snowﬂake’s ML capabilities, it has been able to reduce this complexity and streamline certain workﬂows.

To achieve its mission of empowering the world to design, Canva needed to consolidate data management and utilisation into a single, highly scalable solution.

Through an evaluation, Canva determined the Snowflake platform and AI Data Cloud delivered reliability, flexibility and functionality. It was also easy to use and could grow to support Canva’s flourishing business.

The Snowﬂake product roadmap also incorporated a range of AI-powered features that could help Canva maximise the value of data to marketing and other functions across the business.

Having quickly built trust internally in the Snowﬂake platform and AI Data Cloud, Canva now uses a range of Snowﬂake features to accelerate global growth and product velocity. These include Snowpipe for real-time data ingestion and Cortex AI for business-to-business lead routing.

Making sense of fast-growing volumes of data

With Snowﬂake, Canva established a scalable data architecture that supported the business’s appetite for innovation. The platform and AI Data Cloud enabled Canva to continue making sense of data as it increased in volume and complexity. At the same time, the business was able to maintain the efﬁciency and performance of its systems.

Canva is now poised to push the boundaries of AI and analytics with the Snowﬂake platform and AI Data Cloud. This means using Snowﬂake to tackle bigger questions at a lower cost, address more complex problems faster, and answer questions with greater certainty.

To meet these challenges, Canva is testing a range of Snowflake AI capabilities, including Cortex Analyst, a managed, LLM-powered Snowflake Cortex feature that enables organisations to create applications that answer questions based on structured data in the Snowflake platform.

Scale thousands of ads faster with Snowﬂake

These innovations build on a range of rich use cases enabled by the Snowﬂake platform and AI Data Cloud at Canva. For example, the business is using Snowﬂake to optimise B2B sales and marketing activities, including lead routing, scoring and attribution. With this robust data foundation, the business has expanded from serving primarily individual creators to delivering an enterprise-grade solution, Canva Enterprise, that services companies such as Salesforce, HP Inc. and Expedia.

Powering a feature-rich roadmap

The Snowﬂake platform and AI Data Cloud also enable Canva to validate development at scale, accelerating the delivery of features and enhancements to its hundreds of millions of users. This data-driven approach powers an extensive roadmap for the development of products such as the recently launched Canva Sheets, a visual-ﬁrst spreadsheet.

Vendor Selection Criteria

What criteria do you prioritise when selecting technology vendors to partner with Canva, and how do you ensure these partnerships support the company’s growth and innovation goals?

There’s a saying: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.” That mindset shapes how we approach vendor selection—the upfront work helps avoid downstream surprises.

The cheapest tool rarely delivers the best value, especially at our scale. We prioritise scalability without the drama, no surprise usage caps, rigid licenses, or inflexible terms that can’t adapt as we grow. A solution that works at 500 people needs to perform just as well at 5,000 and beyond.

We also look for a strong technical fit and a genuine partner mindset. Our engineering teams move quickly, so we need vendors who can keep pace and ideally grow with us. That often leads us to emerging tech companies where we’re among the first major customers. The shared ambition usually results in deeper collaboration than we typically see with larger, more rigid providers.

Security and compliance are table stakes, especially as we expand our AI capabilities. We also value cost transparency, seamless integration, and longterm alignment. But above all, we look for partners who make our teams more effective—not just better equipped.

The Total Economic Impact™ of AWS Marketplace, a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting

Organizations across industries face growing complexity in procuring and managing software, data, and professional services. A new study from Forrester reveals how organizations achieved signiﬁcant time and cost savings through AWS Marketplace.

OVERVIEW

The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of AWS Marketplace study provides data to show the time and cost savings achieved when organizations use AWS Marketplace to ﬁnd, try, buy, deploy and manage cloud solutions. From Forrester, “The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential economic impact of AWS Marketplace on their organizations.”

To develop this framework, Forrester interviewed decision-makers at global enterprises and surveyed small to medium-sized business (SMB) and public sector respondents across global regions and industries who had experience using AWS Marketplace. Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewees and combined the results into a single composite organization that is an enterprise organization with 10,000 employees and revenue of multiple billions per year.

Key ﬁndings based on the composite organization include:

• 377 percent return on investment (ROI), with payback within 6 months

• 70 percent reduction in solution discovery time

• 60 percent faster procurement processes

• 30 percent acceleration in time-to-market with deployment efﬁciencies

Beyond process improvements, organizations reported cost savings through spending in AWS Marketplace, which was enabled through promotional offers, free trials, and pay-as-you-go pricing. These beneﬁts might scale based on the number and size of transactions when using AWS Marketplace.

Alongside the beneﬁts highlighted from the composite organization, this study surveyed 419 SMBs and public sector organizations across the globe. The survey found that these organizations also reported shorter pre-purchase time, faster procurement cycles, and cost savings.

Learn more about AWS Marketplace and the features that enable organizations to save time and reduce costs by watching the on-demand webinar. Watch now

The Total Economic Impact™ Of AWS Marketplace

Based on interviews with six representatives from six organizations and a survey of 419 decision-makers, Forrester created a composite organization and concluded that AWS Marketplace provides buyers the following ﬁnancial impact over a three-year period.

“AWS Marketplace improves the productivity of various teams because it provides a single pane of glass view into questions about our current vendors such as our contract terms and conditions and payment schedules. It provides us with ﬁnancial controls because we know that every purchase has to go through a well-deﬁned process centered around AWS Marketplace.”

“We needed one operational role to ensure we were timely with our renewals, so we saved at least one senior headcount with AWS Marketplace ”

“Because we’re buying development tools through AWS Marketplace, they are already there and installed. Time to market is faster by between 20% and 30%. I would also say we saved internal headcount costs ”

with AWS Marketplace.

Negotiation Best Practices

Can you share insights into your approach to negotiating technology contracts? What strategies have you found effective in achieving favorable terms for Canva?

Honestly, the best negotiations start long before you’re in the room. It’s less about being tough at the table and more about doing your homework—understanding your goals, the market, and the other side’s levers.

I begin by getting clear on our business priorities, growth plans, and deal-breakers. Then I dive into the market—what’s available, what the tech actually delivers, and what likely drives the vendor’s costs. That context helps me understand where there’s room to move.

Before any meeting, I align internally and get sign-off on what I can and can’t agree to. That allows me to make real-time decisions rather than deferring with a “let me get back to you.”

I’m a firm believer in “don’t ask, don’t get,” but I’m also ready to make smart concessions. The best deals aren’t one-sided. When both sides walk away feeling like they’ve won, that’s when you build real, long-term partnerships.

And ultimately, the strongest leverage comes from being willing to walk away, because you’ve already mapped out your limits.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

How do you collaborate with other departments within Canva, such as IT, Legal, and Finance, to ensure a cohesive and efficient technology procurement process?

One of the biggest misconceptions in procurement is thinking we’re the decision-makers. We’re not, we’re facilitators, helping smart people make better decisions together.

At Canva, cross-functional collaboration comes naturally. Our culture is agile, fast-moving, and focused on progress over perfection. We use visual docs (made in Canva, of course) to align on ideas, decisions, and outcomes. Everyone contributes, Legal, IT, Finance, Security & Trust—so we’re drawing on collective wisdom, not just one perspective.

Our purchase workflow functions like a town square. All teams review requests through their expert lens in a transparent flow. If something stalls, it’s never a mystery, anyone can see what’s needed to keep things moving.

For larger purchases, we create dedicated channels with all stakeholders. Everything—questions, decisions, trade-offs—happens in one place. And when the deal’s done, we celebrate. A little recognition goes a long way in keeping people energised for the next big project.

The secret? Respect everyone’s expertise, make collaboration seamless, and always share the wins. That’s what keeps the engine running.

Risk Management in Tech Sourcing

What measures do you implement to manage risks associated with technology sourcing, particularly concerning data security, compliance, and vendor reliability?

Risk management in tech sourcing isn’t about eliminating risk, it’s about understanding it and making smart trade-offs. With millions of users trusting us, we can’t afford to get this wrong. We’ve embedded risk assessment into our procurement workflow—not as a blocker, but as a way to move faster with confidence. Vendors are classified based on the type of data they’ll access. A design tool that interacts with user content is very different from a backend productivity app, and we treat those risks accordingly.

With AI vendors, we pay particular attention to privacy and data ownership. We want to be crystal clear: user content should never end up training someone else’s model. On the security front, we work closely with our Security & Trust team. Instead of overwhelming vendors with endless questionnaires, we focus on what matters most, encryption standards, data residency, incident response protocols. For cloud-native tools, we dig deeper into multi-tenancy models and data isolation.

Vendor reliability is about future-proofing. We evaluate financial stability, operational resilience, and how vendors have handled past outages or service disruptions. We know perfect security doesn’t exist—but transparency builds trust. We’d rather work with vendors who are honest about their limitations than those who overpromise.

Most risks aren’t technical, they’re communication failures in disguise. So we focus on clarity, alignment, and open dialogue from day one.

Impact of AI on Procurement

With the rise of AI and machine learning, how do you see these technologies influencing the future of procurement at Canva? Are there specific AI-driven tools or processes you are considering adopting?

AI is already beginning to reshape how we work in procurement, and at Canva, we’re genuinely excited about the potential it holds. We’re still early in the journey, but adoption has been fast and surprisingly smooth. We’re already using AI to review contracts more efficiently, boost team productivity, and gather sharper market insights. It handles much of the repetitive work, which frees us to focus on strategy, relationships, and better decision-making.

Looking ahead, one area we’re particularly excited about is agentic AI, tools that don’t just assist but act. We’re testing ways it could support smaller tasks, such as triaging purchase requests, comparing vendors, or kicking off low-risk renewals. These processes still involve human oversight, but the goal is to have AI handle more of the heavy lifting. We’re also exploring how AI can help us stay ahead of vendor risk, streamline documentation, and eliminate busywork throughout the sourcing lifecycle.

AI won’t replace the human side of procurement but it’s already making us sharper and more proactive. For us, it’s not about whether we’ll use AI, but how far we can take it responsibly and how quickly we can unlock real value.

Advice for Aspiring Procurement Leaders

What advice would you offer to professionals aspiring to lead technology sourcing in dynamic and fast-growing companies like Canva?

If you want to lead tech sourcing in a fast-growing company, get comfortable being uncomfortable. You’ll face problems with no playbook—and honestly, that’s the fun part. Start by getting curious about technology. You don’t need to know how to code, but you do need to understand how things work and why they matter. Spend time with engineers—they love talking about what they’re building, and those conversations will teach you more than any course ever could.

On the security front, we work closely with our Security & Trust team.

Build strong relationships across the business. Some of the best insights come from casual conversations. People are usually happy to share what they know if you show genuine interest. Always remember, you’re not just negotiating; you’re solving business problems. Be honest about what you don’t know. I’ve learned the most by asking questions, not by pretending to have all the answers.

And finally, invest in your people skills. Procurement is all about relationships. Great leaders know when to push, when to pause, and when to partner.

If you love variety, solving puzzles, and making a real impact, this is the role for you.

Canva is a trailblasing online design platform (launched 2013) offering intuitive, drag-and-drop tools for creating social media content, presentations, videos, and more. With a global user base surpassing 220 million and support for 100+ languages, Canva powers creativity for individuals, teams, and enterprises with both free and AI-enhanced premium offerings .

Vinod Kumar Technology Sourcing Lead