Canva

About

Canva is a web-based drag-and-drop design and publishing platform offering templates, assets, AI-assisted design, collaboration, and integrations for teams to create presentations, graphics, videos, and documents.

Mission

Canva is an online design and publishing platform founded in 2012 in Sydney that offers simple, web-based tools for creating graphics, documents, and presentations for individuals and enterprises. Its tools are used in 190 countries and the platform reports more than 240 million monthly active users. The company has reported annualised revenue of nearly $3.3 billion. Canva has been investing heavily in AI, adding features that let users generate designs and interactive elements using plain-English commands. Management has signaled a push toward public markets—hiring Kelly Steckelberg as CFO in 2023 to help guide an anticipated IPO—and prepared liquidity programs for employees ahead of a likely listing. Canva is described in the article as a design unicorn. The piece reports a large secondary share sale of US$1.5 billion (A$2.26 billion). Quadrant’s Strategic Equity Fund and its co‑investment funds ploughed $500 million into that secondary sale. The transaction valued Canva at $25 billion. The deal involved Quadrant buying shares from early investor Blackbird Ventures. The article notes this was the first investment by Quadrant’s new strategic equity fund and does not provide operating metrics or future plans. Canva is an Australian design company offering tools for presentations, videos, photos and a wide range of visual design needs. The platform serves more than 75 million monthly users and was set to achieve a $1 billion yearly revenue run in late 2021. Canva is female-founded and female-led, with CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins, who has been reported as the second richest woman in Australia. On May 29, former Disney CEO Bob Iger acquired a stake in the closely held company and will serve as an advisor. Neither Iger nor Canva disclosed the size or amount of his investment. In September the company raised $200 million in a round led by T. Rowe Price that set a $40 billion valuation. Canva provides a simple, drag-and-drop design platform paired with a massive library of templates, fonts, imagery, GIFs and video to let non-designers and professionals create a wide range of assets. The company pursues a bottoms-up enterprise strategy: a generous free product drives virality and converts teams to paid plans. Canva serves more than 60 million monthly active users across 190 countries, with over 500,000 paying teams and an expected run rate exceeding $1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2021. The product integrates with other design tools and focuses on collaboration and organizational templates rather than competing directly with vector-design specialists. Canva plans to expand the product suite with website-building features, a new video editor and an offline mode. The company employs about 2,000 people and plans to use the new funding to double its workforce over the next year. Canva is a visual communications platform offering drag-and-drop design tools, templates, and a vast content library for teams and workplaces. The company has invested heavily in its workplace Presentations product, launching features such as Workplace Templates, Talking Presentations, Canva Live, mobile-first capabilities, Magic Shortcuts, and charts and infographics. Canva reports more than 55 million monthly active users, over 250 million presentations created to date, and a content library with more than 9,000 presentation templates and over 100 million design ingredients. Workplace adoption includes 85% of Fortune 500 companies and customers such as American Airlines, Live Nation, Kimberly Clark, McKinsey, and Salesforce. Financially, Canva surpassed $500 million in annualized revenue this year, achieved a 130% year-over-year increase in annualized revenue, and remains profitable. Founded in 2013 and based in Sydney, the company positions itself as a collaboration platform for modern, distributed teams.

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