Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins. Image: Canva
CEO Melanie Perkins revealed the new valuation after a $200m funding round, along with some important updates on the company’s future plans.
Canva has raised $200m in its latest funding round and is now valued at $40bn, a 40-fold increase in value in less than four years.
The private design software company made the announcement yesterday (14 September) along with a blog post written by co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins on the company’s future plans.
T Rowe Price led the funding round, which saw participation from new and existing investors including Franklin Templeton, Sequoia, Bessemer, Greenoaks, Dragoneer, Blackbird, Felicis and AirTree.
“Visual communication has emerged as a universal need for teams of every size across almost every industry,” said Perkins. “It has been incredible to see the continued growth of Canva across the globe over the last year.”
She said that more than 60m active users from across 190 countries now use Canva for their design needs every month, including start-ups, non-profits, students, work teams and big global brands. “We’re incredibly excited to be further accelerating our mission to truly empower the world to design.”
The fresh round of funding will be used to expand Canva’s team of more than 2,000 employees and the Sydney-headquartered company hopes to double its headcount within the next year.
‘Exceptional growth’
Canva said its users create on average 120 designs every second and, to date, its platform has been used to create more than 7bn designs. The company has seen incredible growth over the past year, more than doubling its revenue. It said it is on track to exceed $1bn in annual revenue at the end of this year.
Alan Tu, portfolio manager of T Rowe Price’s global tech fund, said that the need for both visual communication and online collaboration has become “increasingly paramount” and is driving Canva’s “exceptional growth and adoption in teams and workplaces of every size and across many industries”.
With the mass shift to remote work, the company said that the number of teams using its services has more than quadrupled over the last year and now includes Fortune 500 companies such as Zoom, Salesforce, Marriott International, PayPal and American Airlines.
More than 6m presentations are created on the platform each week – tripling in the last 12 months. The company also said that new services are in the pipeline for launch later this year, including a video editor, website creator and an offline mode feature.
‘Many years in the making’
Perkins laid out the company’s next set of goals in a blog post and said that its latest funding and valuation news has been “many years in the making”.
“Back in 2012, we set out with the crazy big goal of empowering the whole world to design. We believed that design was something that should be accessible to everyone, not just a privileged few,” she wrote, adding that Canva’s next steps are to become one of the most valuable companies in the world and to “do the most good we can”.
Perkins also said that the company’s philanthropic goals are being met by its commitment to the Pledge 1%, where Canva will give 1pc of its equity, profits, time and products to “be a force for good in the world”.
She and co-founder Cliff Obrecht will be committing a “vast majority” of their 30pc stake in Canva for charitable causes. “We have this wildly optimistic belief that there is enough money, goodwill and good intentions in the world to solve most of the world’s problems, and we want to spend our lifetime working towards that.”
