For those who might not know, Canva is an online design platform that makes creating graphics and schmick looking presos a bloody piece of cake.
Today, Canva have announced they have doubled their valuation in less than a year and raised an additional 19.8 million bucks in a second round of funding. This takes the company’s funding to a total of around $55.6 million.
To give you a better idea of just how well they’ve been doing, in the 3 years they’ve been around, more than 100 million designs have been created on the platform. Five designs are created every fricken second.
We had a yarn with co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins about the the need that birthed Canva and what the future holds.
Mel says the design platform was born out of the demands placed on the modern worker to become a jack of all trades, rather than a specialist of a particular area.
“That was actually one of the guiding principals when we first came up with the idea. So I was at university and I was teaching design programs that were super complex and difficult, but essentially the nature of work has completely changed. Now people are working in teams a lot more and having to create a lot more visual content,” she said.
“The dominant players to date were created literally before the internet, and so a lot of the basic premises of why they were built have dramatically changed and aren’t necessarily keeping up to what we need today.”
Mel says the mammoth boost in funding from Australia’s Blackbird Ventures and Silicon Valley’s Felicis Ventures will allow the company to go full pelt at growth and product development.
“We’re actually in a very fortunate position in that we haven’t spent any of our previous round,” she said.
“We really love Blackbird Ventures and Felicis Ventures who we’ve been working with for some time, and had a crazy amount of investor interest, but our goal is really just to quadruple down on all of our growth plans and product plans.”
Canva is currently available in 179 countries and in 11 different languages. Multilingual media creation is fkn SIK.
Keen to absolutely dominate the market, they’re sights are set very high and a complete Canva is far from ready, but with 10 million users already on board, they certainly have a pretty good idea of what they want it to be.
“It’s the platform that powers the modern workforce,” says Mel.
“There’s so much demand for visual literacy and to be able to communicate ideas visually. It’s everything from pitch decks to presentations to social media graphics and marketing materials. We want to enable everyone to take their idea and turn that into a design, and so we’ve got such a long way to go yet.”
A massive achievement for a rad startup. We wish Mel and her team the best of luck.
Photo: Supplied.
