Less than six month ago, publications – including ours – were celebrating Aussie design software startup Canva for doubling its paper valuation to an impressive $19.7 billion in less than a year. Today, Canva has once again managed to increase its valuation by more than double to US$40 billion (AU$55 billion) after securing US$200 million (AU$273 million) in a new round of funding. For reference, that figure edges out the market capitalisation of ASX-listed giants such as Twiggy Forrest’s Fortescue Metals, Woolworths, Telstra, Nick Molnar’s Afterpay, and Suncorp.
The latest capital raise was led by investments firms behind the previous capital raise, Dragoneer, T. Rowe Price, and Blackbird Ventures; in addition to the following:
- Franklin Templeton
- Sequoia
- Bessemer Venture Partners
- Greenoaks Capital
- Felicis Ventures
- Airtree Ventures
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Effectively, it’s now one of the most valuable private software companies out there (and the most valuable private consumer software company period). CB Insights indicates this development also makes Canva the world’s fifth most valuable startup after TikTok parent company ByteDance, payment processing fintech Stripe, BNPL operation Klarna, as well as Elon Musk’s SpaceX
“Visual communication has emerged as a universal need for teams of every size across almost every industry,” says Melanie Perkins, CEO & Co-Founder of Canva.
“It’s a huge vote of confidence in what we’re doing and where we’re going. 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.”
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What does this mean for Perkins and co-founder / husband Cliff Obretch? Given how the duo retains what Forbes estimates to be 18% stakes each, their collective net worths now exceed $19.8 billion… which they’ve already pledged to give the “vast majority” of away to various charitable causes.
“If the whole thing was about building wealth that would be the most uninspiring thing I could possible 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.”
At the time of this writing, in addition to the $55 billion paper valuation, Canva has over 60 million monthly active users across 190 countries – with companies like Salesforce, Marriott International, PayPal, American Airlines on the enterprise plan – and 500,000+ paying teams. By the end of 2021, it expects to break $1 billion in annualised revenue; and according to Mel Perkins herself, the business has no interest in an IPO. Yet.
