Canva, an Australian graphic design company, has been valued at $40 billion (£29 billion), making it one of the world’s largest privately held firms. More clients worked from home during the epidemic, according to the online design platform. It just announced a new $200 million round of private equity funding, more than tripling the company’s worth in only five months. According to experts, this makes it one of the most valuable start-ups in the world. Canva is the fifth-most valuable start-up in the world, according to business data source CB Insights, behind China’s ByteDance, which owns TikTok, payment platform Stripe, Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, and Swedish financial technology firm Klarna.
The financing also ranks its co-founders among Australia’s top ten wealthiest individuals. Melanie Perkins, 34, and Cliff Obrecht, 35, both Australians, established Canva in Sydney in 2013. Canva was created by a 30-year-old woman in university. According to Forbes, they own roughly 36% of the firm together. They also stated on Wednesday that they planned to donate the vast bulk of the stock – around 30% of the company’s value – to charity causes. Canva offers design templates for greeting cards, posters, resumes, and calendars, among other things.
It claimed to have 500,000 paying customers, including Zoom, Salesforce, Paypal, Marriott International, and American Airlines, all of whom indicated they had expanded their usage of Canva’s design technology in the previous year. “The move to remote working has seen team adoption more than quadruple over the last 12 months, from major corporations to small businesses,” the firm said in a news statement, referring to the number of organizations using its software.
