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All-in-one visual communication platform Canva is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Co-founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams launching Canva with the ambitious mission to empower the world to design.
While it all started from humble beginnings around a table in Perth, Australia, Canva has now scaled to a team of more than 4,000 employees across eight campuses. A decade since its inception, Canva has emerged as the pioneer of the mass market visual communication category, and is now synonymous with quick and easy design.
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More than 135 million people use Canva’s platform every month, and together, they’ve created more than 17 billion designs.
From presentations to documents, videos and websites, today, more than 200 new designs are created in Canva every second. The company’s growth continues to accelerate, having added more than 45 million new monthly users in the last 12 months, a figure that originally took eight years to achieve.
Canva enters its second decade with more than $1.5 billion in annualized revenue, and a six-year track record of profitability.
“We’re incredibly proud to mark this milestone moment and it’s just the beginning. Empowering the whole world to design has been our mission for the last decade and this remains just as critical as it was when we first launched Canva back in 2013,” said Canva Co-founder and CEO, Melanie Perkins.
“We’re very fortunate to have had the support and contributions of millions of people who have shaped Canva’s journey – from our earliest investors and those who are joining us today for our next phase of growth, to our amazing global community and team who create magic every single day.”
The last two years have seen Canva rapidly expand its presence amongst enterprises and workplaces. The company now counts brands including Zoom, FedEx, Starbucks and Salesforce as enterprise customers using Canva’s visual communication platform to manage and scale global brands.
This rapid surge in demand is evidenced by the more than one million people now listing Canva as a core skill on their LinkedIn profile – a figure that has increased by 72% year-over-year.
Building a $40 billion household name
Canva launched nearly a decade ago with the goal of taking a fragmented design ecosystem, integrating it all into one simple page, and making it accessible to the whole world. Canva’s Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins first came up with the idea for Canva while studying at the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia, and teaching design programs to her classmates.
After seeing students struggle with using the current tools in the market, Melanie alongside Cliff Obrecht (now Canva’s Chief Operations Officer) launched Fusion Books which took the idea of a simple design tool and applied it to the niche market of school yearbooks.
During a five-year period, Fusion Books grew to be the largest yearbook company in Australia, and expanded into France and New Zealand. Having known all along that the technology they’d developed could be applied more broadly, Melanie, Cliff, and now Canva’s Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams, set out to raise funding before officially launching Canva in 2013.
In 2021, after achieving a lifetime-worth of milestones including a series of strategic Europe-based acquisitions and 75 million monthly users, Canva became one of the most valuable private software companies in the world with its valuation skyrocketing from $6 billion to $40 billion in under 18 months.
A decade of empowering the world to design
A decade into its journey, and with the launch of its Visual Suite and AI tools now under its belt, Canva is now the only all-in-one visual communication platform in the world. Individual creators, schools, nonprofits, and workplaces have embraced the power of simple design, photos, collaboration features, videos and AI to stand out in an increasingly visual world.
The ease of use, collaborative nature and breadth of Canva’s product suite has seen increased adoption across the globe, with workplace usage soaring across a wide variety of professions and industries including 85% of the Fortune 500.
The company has also progressed towards its deeper mission which it refers to as a Two-Step Plan: Step one is to build one of the world’s most valuable companies; Step two is to do the best it can.
From the 400,000 nonprofits and 45 million teachers and students using Canva for free, to its partnership with GiveDirectly to distribute a $30 million cash transfer program for people living in extreme poverty in Malawi, with 30% of the company pledged towards social good, Canva’s progress towards Step One through the growth of its business continues to unlock its philanthropic ambitions for Step Two.
Looking ahead, Canva shows no signs of slowing down as the company celebrates this important milestone.
