Canva marked down to $34.9B as AI reality bites
Two stories this morning about what the AI era is doing to the software economy's old guard: Canva's own backers just cut billions off its valuation, and Meta's Superintelligence Lab is losing one of its most expensive hires to a startup.
Canva's two biggest backers have revalued the design giant at $34.9 billion, down from $42 billion in 2025, in the sharpest insider signal yet that AI competition is repricing even the most successful software incumbents. Blackbird and Airtree — the Australian funds that bankrolled Canva's rise — cut their mark, and Canva's own internal valuation has fallen to $31 billion from $38.9 billion, moves the Australian Financial Review describes as wiping $10 billion off the company. Capital Brief reports some offshore investors now privately question whether Canva could be worth "$12 billion or even less" as generative design tools eat into a market the company once owned. Canva is far from broken — but the boardroom math has flipped: after a year in which AI tools began producing finished visuals on demand, the investors who know the business best no longer believe the premium valuation holds. Expect this pattern to repeat: 2021's software winners are being repriced against model-native entrants, and increasingly the markdowns come from inside, not from public markets.
Jiahui Yu, the multimodality lead Meta reportedly recruited from OpenAI for a package around $100 million, is leaving the Superintelligence Lab to found a startup. Yu announced the departure this week, saying he wants to devote his full attention to "something crucial to humanity's future" that few people are exploring; the direction is undisclosed. He joined Zuckerberg's superintelligence push in June 2025 as one of 11 named key talents — seven of them Chinese — and co-founded the TBD lab with Zuckerberg and Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, helping ship the native multimodal reasoning model Muse Spark plus the Muse Image and Muse Video generators this year. A USTC and UIUC alum who co-led Google DeepMind's Gemini multimodal work and was a research lead on OpenAI's o3, o4-mini and GPT-4.1, Yu is the second of the lab's named key talents to walk: Ruoming Pang jumped to OpenAI earlier this year, part of a broader drain that also took researcher Pengchuan Zhang. Zuckerberg's nine-figure retention math is looking less bulletproof than it did at the peak of the 2025 talent war.
What to watch: what Yu builds next — and whether Meta's Muse roadmap slows without its multimodality lead.
Zuckerberg paid nine figures to win the 2025 talent war — is loyalty now just a line item? Tell us in the comments.
