Canva is now valued at $ 40 billion after a new capital injection of $ 200 million (USD) in a round led by T. Rowe Price. New and existing investors participated in the round, including Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis and AirTree Ventures.
This round solidifies Canva as one of the most valuable private software companies out there, and also propels the Australian tech scene forward.
Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins and her team started working at Canva in 2012 and launched the product in 2013. The premise behind this was relatively simple, but the technology itself … not so much.
Canva allows anyone to design. Presentations, t-shirts, brochures, flyers … whatever. The first step in this is to create a truly simple user interface, where people can simply drag and drop components into their designs, complete with hundreds of thousands of templates, without making a lot of fine adjustments. The second step is to create a massive library of content, from fonts to templates, images, gifs, and videos. The third step is to make that product accessible to everyone, be it a platform or device or language or price.
Going after everyone, rather than just the designers, has proven incredibly fruitful for the company. To be clear, designers still use Canva to design components that they have designed in other products, such as Figma and Sketch, and Canva actually plays very well with a variety of design software products. But Canva has no intention of going toe-to-toe with Figma, Adobe, or Sketch.
Perkins described it with the example of a business card. Designers will create the components of a business card on their design platform of choice and then design the business card template in Canva, sharing that template with the entire organization. That way, when someone gets a title change or a new employee shows up, they can edit the card themselves without the help of a designer and send it to print.
TechCrunch asked Perkins why Canva hasn’t extended the platform more aggressively into professional designers’ workflows.
“We would like to replace PDF,” Perkins said. “Instead of people sending PDF files back and forth between designer and client, designers can just create a template for organizational use. It’s less important for us to absolutely excel at things like vector design because there are amazing programs on the market that may be there. We really want to focus on that collaborative piece. ”
Although a bottom-up business strategy is relatively popular these days, Canva was one of the early masters of the model. Canva was released as a free product, and over time the company introduced business layers into the mix.
As of now, Canva has over 60 million monthly active users in 190 countries, with big name companies on the business plan. This includes Salesforce, Marriott International, PayPal, and American Airlines. Canva expects to exceed $ 1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2021. More than 500,000 teams are paying for the product in some way.
With a team of 2,000 people, Canva will use the new funding to double its workforce in the next year.
Canva also shared its DEI numbers, with women making up 42% of the workforce. The company did not share any statistics about people of color on the team.
Perkins explained to TechCrunch that a large part of the company’s growth has to do with an obsession with creating a highly valuable free product.
“We intentionally make our free product extremely generous for a number of reasons,” Perkins said. “It is central to both our marketing and our mission to empower people to design. But, as part of our marketing, it means that people can love the product, share it with their friends and family, and promote it on social media. And then that virality really quickly fuels our growth. ”
In addition to growing the team, Canva also has plans to further develop the product in the coming year, launching the website design soon. This will allow users to convert existing and new layouts and layouts to a website, and even search for and purchase a domain for that site.
Canva is also working on a new video editor and offline mode.
Perkins says that Canva has two goals, and that each fuels the other. The first is to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, and the other is to do the greatest good I can do.
The company has already joined the 1% commitment and has various efforts to be a force for good, including delivering the premium product to more than 130,000 nonprofits, assigning more than 45,000 volunteer hours each year. and the launch of Print One, Plant One, which is a project that plants a tree for every print order placed through Canva.
With today’s funding announcement, co-founders Perkins and Cliff Obrecht are committing the vast majority of their own equity in the company (around 30%) to doing good in the world, with plans to do so through the Canva Foundation. .
Perkins will join us at Disrupt to discuss new financing, valuation, what awaits Canva, and share his broader thoughts on design as a category.
