Canva is now estimated at $40 billion following a recent capital shot of $200 million US dollars in a fresh round led by T. Rowe Price. New investors along with present ones joined the round. The capitalists include Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis, and AirTree Ventures.
This funding round sets Canva as one of the most worthy private software companies out there, and it also impels the Australian tech scene ahead.
The duo, who married back earlier this year, launched in 2013 but the co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins and her team began working on Canva in 2012. The outlook behind it was comparatively easy, but the technology is not.
Canva’s best part is that it allows anyone to design many pieces of stuff just by making some clicks and edit respectively. They have thousands of templates related to presentations, brochures, posters, flyers, t-shirts, etc. Their initial step was to create a simple UI where users can simply drag and drop some elements into their designs, equipped with many templates, without putting in much effort. The later step is to create a huge library of relevant components as per users’ choices, from fonts to gifs, videos, many more. The third and most important step is to make the tool open to everyone in terms of platform, device or language, and price.
Canva proved very fruitful as it is accessible to everyone and not just limited to designers.
TechCrunch asked Perkins why Canva hasn’t extended the platform more aggressively into the workflow of professional designers.
“We would like to replace PDF,” said Perkins. “Rather than people sending PDFs backward and forwards between the designer and the client, designers can just create a template for organization 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 collaboration piece.”
Though a bottoms-up business strategy is relatively popular these days, Canva was an early master of the model. Canva started as a free product, and over time the company introduced enterprise layers into the mix.
As of now, Canva has more than 60 million monthly active users across 190+ countries, with big-name companies on the enterprise plan. This includes Salesforce, Marriott International, PayPal, and American Airlines. Canva expects to surpass $1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2021. More than 500,000 teams are paying for the product in some capacity.
With a 2,000-person team, Canva will use the new funding to double its workforce in the next year. Alongside growing the team, Canva is also working on a new video editor and an offline mode.
