Microsoft is launching a simple graphic design app called Designer that will be available for free and as part of Office productivity software subscriptions, the company said Wednesday.
The software represents an alternative to Canva, a design app boasting more than 100 million monthly active users. Based in Sydney, Canva is one of the world’s most valuable startups, boasting a $40 billion post-money valuation as of last year. But one of the startup’s investors, Blackbird Ventures, reportedly lowered its valuation of the company to $25.6 billion earlier this year as inflation and recession fears caused software stock prices to tumble.
Microsoft has sought to demonstrate the value of Office subscriptions by adding new capabilities, and earlier this year it raised the prices of some bundles aimed at businesses. Office controls the market, and companies are constantly attempting to topple the leader in the category. The closest competitor is Google. On Tuesday Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said Workspace had more than 8 million paying subscribers, up from over 6 million as of April 2020.
Increasingly, Canva is going after core parts of Office. It introduced an alternative to the PowerPoint slide development program in 2021, and in September it brought out a tool to edit documents, challenging Word. Canva says it has 55,000 paid teams using its software including at Amazon, FedEx, PepsiCo, Pfizer and Salesforce.
With its Designer app, Microsoft is initially aiming at consumers, a spokesperson told CNBC in an email. But the application could also prove useful to workers inside of companies, government agencies and schools, where Microsoft has a larger base of users. Microsoft could expand Designer to additional markets, including enterprises, if it perceives sufficient interest, the spokesperson said.
In the current economy, some companies have sought to save money by reducing the number of software providers they count on, and adding Designer to commercial Office subscriptions at some point might help companies cut out payments to Canva, for one.
“No company is better positioned than Microsoft to help organizations deliver on their digital imperative so that they can do more with less,” as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on a conference call with analysts in July.
The launch of Designer might also make Microsoft bump up against Adobe, which fields the free Adobe Express tool that features templates and stock images. Canva is “where beginners get started before they come to Adobe,” Jonathan Vaas, Adobe’s vice president of investor relations, said at a Bank of America event in January.
But Microsoft has a close partnership with Adobe, and the two companies have more than 30 product integrations. “Adobe remains our key, at-scale strategic partner and this new consumer design application does not change our engagement with Adobe in any way,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email.
People can draw on templates to come up with social media posts in Designer, Liat Ben-Zur, a Microsoft corporate vice president, wrote in a blog post. Social media is also probably the most popular medium for which people design in Canva, said Cliff Obrecht, the startup’s co-founder and operating chief, in an interview last month. But Obrecht said Canva is “not competing against Microsoft.” Its primary competitor is Adobe, he said.
Designer can automatically come with visual designs when people enter text, thanks to an integration with DALL-E 2 artificial intelligence software from Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI. The two companies don’t want Designer to surface inappropriate content. OpenAI took out the most explicit sexual and violent content from AI training data for the system, while Microsoft recently implemented a change that helps to generate more diverse results, Ben-Zur wrote.
For now, people can join a waiting list for the free preview of Designer online. Once the app becomes generally available, Microsoft will maintain a free tier, along with a premium version for those with Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions, the spokesperson said.
Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss (L-R), creators of crypto exchange Gemini Trust Co., on stage at the Bitcoin 2021 Convention, a cryptocurrency conference held at the Mana Convention Center in Wynwood in Miami, Florida, on June 4, 2021.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Gemini Space Station, the crypto company founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, priced its initial public offering at $28 per share late Thursday, according to Bloomberg.
A person familiar with the offering told the news service that the company priced the offering above its expected range of $24 to $26, which would value the company at $3.3 billion.
Since Gemini capped the value of the offering at $425 million, 15.2 million shares were sold, according to the report. That was a measure of high demand for the crypto company, which had initially marketed 16.67 million shares. Earlier this week, it increased its proposed price range from between $17 and $19 apiece.
A Gemini spokesperson could not confirm the report.
The company and the selling stockholders granted its underwriters — led by and Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley — a 30-day option to sell an additional 452,807 and 380,526 shares, respectively, per the registration form. Gemini stock will trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol “GEMI.”
Up to 30% of the shares offered will be reserved for retail investors through Robinhood, SoFi, Hong Kong-based Futu Securities, Singapore’s Moomoo Financial, Webull and other platforms.
Gemini, which primarily operates as a cryptocurrency exchange, was founded by the Winklevoss brothers in 2014 and holds more than $21 billion of assets on its platform as of the end of July.
Initial trading will give the market a sense of how long it can keep the crypto IPO party going. Circle Internet and Bullish had successful listings, but there has been a recent consolidation in the prices of blue chip cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether. Also, in contrast to those companies’ profitability, Gemini has reported widening losses, especially in 2025. Per its registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gemini posted a net loss of $159 million in 2024, and in the first half of this year, it lost $283 million.
This week, however, Gemini received a big vote of institutional confidence when Nasdaq said it’s making a strategic investment of $50 million in the crypto company. Nasdaq is seeking to offer its clients access to Gemini’s custodial services, and gain a distribution partner for its trade management system known as Calypso.
Gemini also offers a crypto-backed credit card, and last month, launched another card in partnership with Ripple. The latter garnered more than 30,000 credit card sign-ups in August, a new monthly high that was more than twice the number of credit card sign-ups in the prior month, according to the S-1 filing.
Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:
(Learn the best 2026 strategies from inside the NYSE with Josh Brown and others at CNBC PRO Live. Tickets and info here.)
Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella (L), speaks with OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, who joined by video during the Microsoft Build 2025, conference in Seattle, Washington on May 19, 2025.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
OpenAI on Thursday said its nonprofit parent will continue to have oversight over the company and will own an equity stake of more than $100 billion.
The artificial intelligence startup, recently valued at $500 billion, said this structure will make the nonprofit “one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world,” and will allow the company to continue to raise capital.
OpenAI also announced it has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with Microsoft, which outlines the next phase of their partnership. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, backing the company as early as 2019, three years before the launch of of the chatbot ChatGPT.
“We are actively working to finalize contractual terms in a definitive agreement,” OpenAI said in a joint statement with Microsoft, which is also the company’s key cloud partner. “Together, we remain focused on delivering the best AI tools for everyone, grounded in our shared commitment to safety.”
In May, OpenAI bowed to pressure from civic leaders and ex-employees, announcing that its nonprofit would retain control even as the company was restructuring into a public benefit corporation. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but has in recent years become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet.
OpenAI said Thursday it is working closely with the California and Delaware Attorneys General to establish its structure.
“OpenAI started as a nonprofit, remains one today, and will continue to be one – with the nonprofit holding the authority that guides our future,” the company’s Chairman Bret Taylor said in a statement Thursday.
The startup has been engulfed in a heated legal battle with Elon Musk, one of its co-founders. Musk has been trying to keep OpenAI from converting into a for-profit company as he competes in the generative AI market with his own startup, xAI.
OpenAI said its nonprofit is also opening applications for the first phase of a $50 million grant initiative that is aimed to support other nonprofit and community organizations across AI literacy, economic opportunity and community innovation.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella departs following a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Sept. 4, 2025.
Eric Lee | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees in a meeting on Thursday that the company has work to do to smooth relations with employees after announcing several rounds of layoffs and a mandated partial return toin-person work.
In the meeting that was held online, an employee asked executives to speak about a perceived lack of empathy in the company’s culture as of late and steps Microsoft is taking to rebuild trust with its workforce.
“I deeply appreciate that, the question and the sentiment behind it,” Nadella said, in audio that was obtained by CNBC. “I take it as feedback for me and everyone in the leadership team, because at the end of the day, I think we can do better, and we will do better.”
Nadella’s comments come after Microsoft slashed 9,000 jobs in July, following smaller reductions in the months prior. On Tuesday, Microsoft said workers living near its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, must come into the office three days a week, starting in February, with a broader rollout to follow.
Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s human resources chief, said at Thursday’s meeting that reception to the return-to-office announcement has been mixed, with some workers feeling like they’re losing autonomy. But she said that employees in and around Seattle already come in, on average, 2.4 times each week.
Like most of the tech industry, Microsoft went fully remote during the pandemic, and made particular use of its internal Teams video and chat offerings, which gained rapid adoption during that period. Microsoft has been slower than many of its peers to put a mandate in place for coming back to the office. Amazon, one of Microsoft’s top rivals, called employees back to offices five days a week in January.
While Nadella and the executive team are taking criticism from some staffers, Wall Street is applauding the company’s growth and execution. The stock is up almost 20% this year, outperforming the broader market, pushing Microsoft’s market cap to $3.7 trillion, which trails only Nvidia among the world’s most-valuable companies.
In July, Microsoft reported a 24% increase in net income to $27 billion. The company’s gross margin was under 69%, compared with 71% in late 2023. It’s rapidly building and renting data center infrastructure to meet artificial intelligence demand.
Nadella said at the meeting that with remote work, new employees and those who are early in their careers don’t always feel a sense of apprenticeship or mentorship.
“Management is just mostly all remote, but the interns are all, you know, in one location,” he said. “And so those are things that just will break a social contract.”
Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment.
Even with Microsoft’s rapid expansion, Nadella said the company is feeling the pressure. It’s a common theme in the software industry, as concerns proliferate about the impact of AI and its potential to automate work.
“We have some very, very hard work ahead of us, and that hard process of renewal is essentially what we have to do,” Nadella said. “You have to be hardcore in terms of an intellectual honesty about what really needs to happen.”
Microsoft’s Azure cloud business grew 39% in the latest quarter, but revenue in the Windows and devices business increased by just 2.5%.
“Some of the biggest businesses we built may not be as relevant going forward,” Nadella said. “Some of the margin that we love today may not be there tomorrow, and that means you have to be way ahead of all of those going away, right?”
Microsoft, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in April, will retain its core values as it confronts market realities, Nadella said.
“Capital markets have one simple truth,” he said. “There is no permission for any company to exist forever.”
That wasn’t the only contentious topic at the meeting.
Employees are awaiting details from a third-party investigation after The Guardian said in August that Israel’s military used Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure to store Palestinians’ phone calls as part of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Microsoft has fired five employees following protests at its headquarters in Redmond, according to a statement from the group No Azure for Apartheid.
Microsoft President Brad Smith, whose office the protesters entered, addressed the issue on Thursday. He said that he and Coleman met with Jewish Microsoft employees, who have been harassed and threatened and have seen their public information shared online.
“We don’t get to control what happens outside Microsoft, but we need to be clear about one thing,” Smith said. “There is no room for antisemitism at Microsoft, and as a company and as a community, we will protect this group and defend them from that.”