Key Sentence:
- Canva is one of the most valuable startups in the world today, raising $200 million in new $40 billion in funding.
The round led by T. Rowe Price with Franklin Templeton, Sequoia, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer, Blackbird, Felicis, and AirTree doubled Australian design software companies’ ranking in five months.
Canva is now at a level that few startups have reached – not only in terms of ranking but only after Stripe on Forbes Cloud’s list of the 100 best private cloud companies. Canva has long been profitable and has a positive cash flow and continues to double its revenue, the company said. Taking one step towards achieving $1 billion in annual revenue by December 2021, “the bulk” of that recurring subscription revenue.
Profitable, multiplied growth and hundreds of millions in sales – why increase at all? One reason, says Perkins, is to double the workforce, which has reached 2,000 this year (Perkins says Canva has received 180,000 applications in the past 12 months). An acquisition near Canva could be another acquisition. Then there’s Perkins’ lifetime mission for Canva, which he thinks is worth playing.
“I’ve always wanted to have enough money in the bank so that when the lights go out tomorrow. And everything goes out, we have enough capital to stay together for a long time.”
With unconventional origins in Perth, Australia, and then Sydney.
Where the company has long been headquartered, Canva has bucked early skepticism about establishing itself as one of the most popular and fastest-growing software tools in the world, and Perkins was awarded a Forbes Award. for 30 under 30, on the cover of December 2019. Canva was founded in 2012 by Perkins, now husband of Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, Graphic Assets.
Today Canva products have evolved to support today’s video, presentation, and live collaboration.
The Canva library currently contains over 800,000 templates and 100 million photos, illustrations, and fonts. Canva has created more than 7 billion designs to date, 120 new inventions every second, according to the company.
Originally known as a tool for amateur designers or small businesses, Canva’s freemium software is used by more than 60 million users per month. But more than 500,000 paid teams already use Canva. Including companies like American Airlines, CBRE, Intel, Kimberly-Clark, and Zoom. For everything from social media assets to sales and people presentations. In the case of Live Nation, Assets for an upcoming rock concert.
The new funding dramatically increases the value of Canva’s founder stock, which was previously valued at $15 billion in April. Forbes estimates that Perkins and Obrecht own about 18% of Canva, and Adams owns 9%. At a $40 billion valuation, that means Perkins and Obrecht each holds $6.5 billion worth of stock. While Adams’s stock is worth $3.2 billion. (Forbes cuts 10% for private companies.)
However, within minutes they weren’t planning to “accumulate” such wealth, Perkins. “If it were just about building wealth, that would be the most inspiring thing I can think of,” Perkins told Forbes. “It feels weird when people call us ‘billionaires’ because it never looks like our money.