Czech entrepreneur Ondřej Nekvinda leaves Canva for a new startup

Czech entrepreneur Ondřej Nekvinda has left a comfortable position at Australia's Canva — the world's largest digital design platform — to build a new startup. At the Forbes Next Big Thing conference in Brno, he explained why now is the perfect time for the move, and what his new team will be working on.

Nekvinda's story began with Smartmockups, a project he launched with Lukáš Zajíc literally as a “weekend project.” Within two years, tens of thousands of people were using the tool to create product visualizations, with a significant share of its audience overlapping with Canva's own users.

When Canva released a new editor, Nekvinda's team found a vulnerability in it and, without much hesitation, built their own integration on top of it — which unexpectedly went viral. The reaction was swift: Canva representatives reached out to the team. “I was really nervous before the call. I expected lawyers, but instead there were engineers asking how we'd done it. One thing led to another, and we ended up in Australia. Long story short, our startup became part of Canva,” the entrepreneur recalls.

Importantly, this wasn't a forced exit — by that point, Smartmockups was already profitable. The founders decided to keep doing the same thing, just now as part of a global industry leader.

At Canva, Nekvinda led the Czech team that built key infrastructure for working with 3D graphics — in his words, “the simplest 3D tool in the world.” He also went through a turning point there: the autumn of 2022 and the explosive rise of ChatGPT and other AI content generators, including graphics ones.

Even though Canva employed almost five thousand people at the time, with the platform used by around 250 million people worldwide, the company, in Nekvinda's view, handled the AI challenge quite well — for example, by giving its global team broad access to all the AI tools on the market. But access to technology alone doesn't guarantee greater efficiency: “If you don't start by changing your processes, the only thing AI leads to is simply more of everything.”

Nekvinda has now left Canva and is launching his own startup — operating systems for small businesses. He isn't revealing details about the new company yet, but he did outline its direction: the industry suffers because software tools are poorly integrated across working teams, and with the rise of AI, a large part of that software will essentially need to be reinvented — retrofitting artificial intelligence into old systems simply won't work.

According to him, a project like this doesn't require a dramatic amount of capital — which means the timing for launching it is genuinely good.