Canva hits $40B valuation, now the fifth most valuable private startup
Not everyone’s born artistic. From your business cards and IG stories to your little cousin’s class posters — Canva’s got you (and its over 60+ million monthly active users).
The Australian company just raised $200M and is now valued at $40B.
- Founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, are estimated to hold $16.2B combined.
- It’s also the fifth most valuable private startup globally, after ByteDance (hi, Tiktok), Stripe, SpaceX and Klarna.
💰 The beginnings of the billions
In 2006, CEO Melanie was a university student tutoring design to students struggling with InDesign and Adobe Photoshop. (I mean, students spending a semester learning how to use design tools totally makes sense, right?)
- She wanted to create an online future for design that was collaborative and easy to use.
She and her now-husband Cliff launched an online yearbook design business in 2007.
- Students could collaborate and design their yearbooks online.
- They started small to test the idea until they launched Canva in 2013.
📈 What’s the current stat?
Now, Canva’s made it so easy that customers create 120 new designs per second. Even big biz knows, with 500,000 teams paying for its business plan, including Zoom, Salesforce, Intel and Marriot.
- It’s got a simple drag and drop interface, so it’s easy to use for anyone. (Even we’ve used it to lay out posts in minutes.)
- Artist’s block? It’s got 800,000 templates and 100M photos, illustrations and fonts.
Canva’s not just impressive for its valuation. It’s long profitable, continuously doubling growth and is on track to reach $1B in revenue for 2021.
- Profitability takes years to attain for startups, much less at Canva’s level. Fast growth and revenue? Even harder.
Where’s the cash going? Although Canva’s current bank balance can cut it, it raised the $$$ to keep growing fast.
- It’s looking to double its team of 2,000, expand to web design and video editing, launch offline mode and kill the PDF.
- Also, on being a multibillionaire: Melanie says it’s NBD, and she and her husband Cliff are donating the majority of their combined billions.
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