Spotify and early Canva staff join “Canva for Audio”

Early employees at tech unicorns Canva and Spotify are joining the team at AI-powered “Canva for Audio” platform Wondercraft, just a few months after it came out of Beta.

Didier Sibellas - Canva’s first full-time Product Designer and Head of Digital Design - has joined Wondercraft as founding Head of Design. He joins Wondercraft’s global team of audio experts and engineers, co-founded by former COO at Acast and early Spotify employee Oskar Serrander and Palantir engineers Dimitris Nikolaou and Youssef Rizk. In recent weeks, Wondercraft has also welcomed Spotify engineers onto its growing team.

Wondercraft’s AI audio studio helps brands and creative teams script, voice and produce studio-quality audio for ads, audiobooks and podcasts in any language, simply by typing.

Dubbed “Canva for Audio” for its ability to radically simplify audio production, the Wondercraft platform features hyper-realistic AI voices which can be directed with absolute precision, seamless music and sound mixing, a versatile AI script- and ad copy assistant, and powerful audio translation tools.

Didier will bring the simple yet powerful design DNA of Canva to the Wondercraft platform, creating a user experience that champion’s creativity and makes it easy for everyone to share their story through audio, as well as powering the seamless creation of audio ads.

Didier Sibellas, Wondercraft’s new Head of Design, comments -

“Wondercraft reminds me so much of the early Canva days. The focus and passion for making content and ad production accessible, fun and fast is tangible in every discussion with the team. Apart from the obvious excitement for the product value and opportunity, what really clicked for me was how united the founders are in building a mission-driven culture and tackling hard problems with simple yet beautiful expressions.”

As Head of Design at Wondercraft, Didier will prioritize Product Design and will be responsible for establishing new design functions on the Wondercraft platform. Didier brings over sixteen years’ design experience to Wondercraft, including an eight year tenure as Head of Digital Design at industry behemoth Canva where he led a global team of more than 300 people.

Oskar Serrander, co-founder at Wondercraft, comments -

“We want to continue investing in world-class design and UX to serve and delight our rapidly growing user base of professional creatives, brands and agencies. And what better place to find talent than one of the most game-changing, design-focused brands in the world? We draw so much inspiration from Canva and we’re excited to have Didier on the team.”

Wondercraft came out of Beta in February this year and is already being used by more than 40,000 storytellers, creatives, audio ad producers and brands, including world leading podcast company Acast and Steven Bartlett of Diary of a CEO.

The platform has been designed for both creators and creative teams, with a suite of team collaboration tools making it easy for creative teams at ad agencies and publishers to work together on audio projects with colleagues, clients and stakeholders.

In February 2024, Wondercraft announced a $3m Seed round led by Will Ventures, Y Combinator, ElevenLabs, Steven Bartlett and other angels.