EDITORS' PICK | Sep 14, 2021, 

03:02pm EDT | 208,940

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Canva Raises
At $40 Billion
Valuation — Its
Founders Are
Pledging Away
Most Of Their
Wealth
Alex Konrad Forbes Staff
Venture Capital
Covering venture capital, software and startups
Canva founders Cameron Adams (left), Cliff Obrecht (center) and
CEO Melanie Perkins (right) now lead one of the world's most
valuable startups from Australia. CANVA

Canva is now one of the world’s most valuable

startups after raising $200 million in new
funding at a $40 billion valuation.

The round, led by T. Rowe Price with Franklin

Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities,
Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital,
Dragoneer, Blackbird, Felicis and AirTree all
participating, more than doubles the Australian
design software company’s valuation in five
months.

Canva’s already on a level few startups have

reached — not just for a valuation second only to
Stripe on the Forbes Cloud 100 list of top private
cloud companies. Long profitable and cash-flow
positive, Canva continues to more than double
in sales, the company says, on pace to reach a $1
billion annualized revenue run-rate by
December 2021, the “vast majority” of that
recurring subscription revenue. “Moving in the
right direction,” cofounder and CEO Melanie
Perkins says matter-of-factly.

Profitable, doubling growth and with hundreds

of millions of revenue — why bother raising at
all? One reason, says Perkins, is to keep
doubling headcount, which reached 2,000 this
year (Perkins says Canva received 180,000 job
applications over the past 12 months). Another
could be acquisitions, sources close to Canva
add. Then there’s Perkins’ own lifelong mission
for Canva, one for which she thinks it’s worth it
to play it safe.

“It’s a huge vote of confidence in what we’re

doing and where we’re going,” Perkins tells
Forbes. “I always like to have enough money in
the bank that if the lights turned off tomorrow
and everything disappeared, we’ve got enough
capital to keep us together for a long time.”

With unusual origins in

Perth, Australia, and then
Sydney, where the
company has long been
based, Canva defied early
skepticism to emerge as
one of the world’s most
Melanie Perkins on the
popular and fastest- cover of Forbes in 2019.
growing software tools, DEAN MACKENZIE/IDC FOR

FORBES ALEX KONRAD

putting Perkins, a Forbes
30 Under 30 alum, on the cover of the magazine
in December 2019. Started in 2012 by Perkins,
now-husband Cliff Obrecht and Cameron
Adams, Canva launched the following year as a
tool to help anyone design, from better-looking
resumes to menus, business cards and other
graphic assets.

Today, Canva’s product has evolved to support

video, presentations and most recently, live
collaboration. With new websites tools, Perkins
says she hopes to help do away with PDF
resumes or event invites in favor of responsive
sites complete with custom web domains (a
product that will pitch Canva, already
competitive with Adobe and Vistaprint, up
against the likes of Squarespace and Wix).
Canva’s library now consists of more than
800,000 templates and 100 million photos,
illustrations and fonts. More than 7 billion
designs have been created in Canva to date, the
company says, with 120 new designs each
second.

Originally known as a tool for amateur designers

or small businesses, Canva’s freemium software
is used by more than 60 million monthly users.
But more than 500,000 paying teams now use
Canva, too, including companies like American
Airlines, CBRE, Intel, Kimberly-Clark and
Zoom, for everything from social media assets to
sales and human resources presentations, or, in
the case of Live Nation, assets for upcoming
rock concerts.

The new funding dramatically increases the

value of Canva’s founders’ stakes in the
business, previously valued at $15 billion
valuation in April. Forbes estimates that Perkins
and Obrecht each own about 18% of Canva, and
Adams 9%. At a $40 billion valuation, that
means Perkins and Obrecht each hold stakes
valued at $6.5 billion, while Adams’ stake is
valued at $3.2 billion. (Forbes deducts 10% for
private company holdings.)

But already on the record that they didn’t plan

to “hoard” such wealth, Perkins and Obrecht are
now pledging to give away 30% of Canva — the
“vast majority” of their stakes — to the Canva
Foundation to be used for charitable causes. “If
the whole thing was about building wealth that
would be the most uninspiring thing I could
possibly imagine,” Perkins tells Forbes. “It has
felt strange when people refer to us as
‘billionaires’ as it has never felt like our money,
we’ve always felt that we’re purely custodians of
it,” she added in a blog post.

Canva first plans to pilot its charitable giving

through a $10 million donation to non-profit
GiveDirectly to distribute to vulnerable families
in Southern Africa; it plans to ramp up its giving
after that.

It’s all part of what Perkins has long described as

a “two step plan” for maximum impact: “become
one of the most valuable companies in the
world, and do the best we can do.” On the first
count, Canva’s well on its way, with no shortage
of investors looking to pony up money even at a
valuation more typical of a public company
(Perkins says she has no current interest in an
IPO). On the second, Canva joined the Pledge
1% movement in the past to donate time, money,
equity and resources to charity; the startup
works with 60,000 schools today and 130,000
non-profits. Canva has also committed to plant
one tree for each print order it services, a tally
that’s reached 2 million to date.

“As we continue to make progress on step one,

step two becomes more important than ever,”
says Perkins. “We really feel a huge
responsibility… it shouldn’t matter where you
are in the world, or socioeconomic status, or
your skills and experience, everyone should have
the ability to design.”

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By Alex Konrad

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Alex Konrad

I'm a senior editor at Forbes covering venture capital,

cloud and enterprise software out of New York. I edit
the Midas List, Midas List Europe, Cloud 100 list and
30… Read More

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