With the valuation of $40 billion, the co-founder of Canva, Melina Perkins, becomes the world’s self-made billionaire under 40. Melina reached the milestone recently after the investment of $200 million by several investors.
Canva recently marked its valuation of $40 billion, making Melina the second wealthiest billionaire in Australia and, together with her husband, the duo lists under Australia’s top ten richest.
The valuation was fueled by the investment of $200 million by Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis and AirTree Ventures.
Canva continues scurring growth
Canva is a free online visual communications and collaboration platform that aims to empower everyone to design.
Launched in 2013, it offers a simplified drag-and-drop user interface and a broad range of templates ranging from presentations, social media graphics, posters, apparel, videos, and much more. Canva has more than 60 million monthly active users in 190 countries.
Moreover, as both usage and global adoption climb, the company moves towards escalating growth by doubling its revenue year on year and remaining on track to exceed $1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year while generating positive free cash flows.
The fresh round of funding will be used to accelerate this continued growth, including expanding Canva’s team of more than 2,000 employees, which the company expects to double in the year ahead.
The Canva has created over 7 billion designs, with 120 innovations created every second using Canva’s expansive library of more than 800,000 templates and over 100 million design ingredients, including photos, stickers, illustrations, videos, and audio tracks.
A teenage dream
Perkins was just 19 when the ides popped up. It was 2006, and she and Obrecht were studying at a university in Perth. Melina would earn a small income on the side by teaching design programs.
But students found the platforms proposed by the likes of Microsoft and Adobe troublesome, and she thought there got to be another way. She saw people spent an entire semester learning where the buttons were, and that bothered her.
“I thought that in the future, it was all going to be online and collaborative and much, much simpler than these tough tools,” Perkins stated to the media.
“Our goal was to take the entire design ecosystem, compile it into one page, and then make it accessible globally,” said Perkins.
Starting small
Melanie Perkins’s and Cliff Obrecht got married back earlier this year. Though launched in 2013, the co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins and her team began working on Canva in 2012. The outlook behind it was comparatively easy, but the technology is not.
The Sydney-headquartered corporation is now worth $40 billion, giving Perkins and her co-founder Cliff Obrecht an estimated personal wealth of $5.9 billion. Amazing how it all began with a high school yearbook business.
With scant resources and little industry knowledge, the couple started small and created an online school catalogue design business, Fusion Year Books, to test their idea.
They launched a website for students which allowed them to collaborate and design their profile pages and articles. The duo would then print the yearbooks and distributed them to schools across Australia.
Growing the team
At present, Canva is helping 60 million active users monthly from 190 countries. Canva will use the new funding to double its workforce in the next year with a 2,000-person team. Besides, Canva is also working on a new video editor and an offline mode.
“I think I’ve always put a lot of pressure on myself. And I think that sort of internal locus of control has been pretty strong,” stated Perkins.
“So, while the expectations around our company and what we’re expected to do is sort of increasing, that’s nothing on what I’ve got on myself!” Canva is estimated to exceed $1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2021.
