Thanks to an epic fundraising round that netted the Australian company $200 million in new investment, Canva is now one of the world’s most valuable startups, with a valuation of $AUD55 billion.
This more than doubles the Sydney-via-Perth design company’s worth in under six months, putting it second on Forbes’ Cloud 100 list of private cloud companies, trailing behind just Stripe.
“It’s a huge vote of confidence in what we’re doing and where we’re going,” cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins told 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.”
Perkins and her co-founder (and husband, picture above, centre) Cliff Obrecht own about 36 per cent of the company that founded in 2012, putting their stakes at $13 billion. They plan to funnel “the vast majority” of it into the Canva Foundation, to be given to charity.
“If the whole thing was about building wealth that would be the most uninspiring thing I could possible imagine,” Perkins says, explaining they have a two-step plan: “become one of the most valuable companies in the world, and do the best we can do.”
It’s an inspiring mission.
“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.”
