Canva is celebrating its 10th anniversary as the world’s only comprehensive visual communication platform. Founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adams launched Canva to improve the world of design.
It all started very humble at a table in Perth, Australia, Canva employs more than 4,000 people spread across eight offices. Ten years after its founding, the platform has become a pioneer in visual communication for the mass market and stands for fast and simple design. More than 135 million people use Canvas every month and a total of 17 billion designs have been created.
200 new designs are created every second from documents to videos and presentations to websites. And the growth is constantly accelerating. In the past twelve months alone, more than 45 million new monthly users were added. It had previously taken the company eight years to do this. Canva generates $1.5 billion in annual sales and has been highly profitable for six years.
“We are incredibly proud to have reached this milestone and this is just the beginning. Providing the whole world with design has been our mission for the past ten years. And that’s just as important as it was when we started Canva in 2013,” said co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins. “We’ve been extremely fortunate to have the support and input from people who have shaped Canva’s journey – starting with from the early investors and those funding our next phase of growth, to our wonderful community, to our team creating miracles every day.”
In the past two years, Canva has been growing its presence among businesses at a particularly rapid pace. Brands like Zoom, FedEx, Starbucks and Salesforce are now among the customers using the visual platform to nurture and manage their global brands. This rapid increase in demand is also reflected in the fact that more than a million users cite “Canva” as one of their most important skills on their LinkedIn profile. That number is up 72% year over year.
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The birth of a $40 billion company
Canva was founded ten years ago with the goal of consolidating a fragmented design world into a single simple page, accessible to the whole world. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins had the spark of an idea for Canva while studying at the University of Western Australia in Perth and teaching her fellow students how to use design programs.
Noticing that students were struggling to use the available tools, Melanie partnered with Cliff Obrecht to create Fusion Books, a simple design tool. They applied it to the niche market for yearbooks. Within five years, Fusion Books became the largest annual book publisher in Australia and then expanded into France and New Zealand. Knowing the technology they were developing could be used more widely, Melanie Cliff and Canva’s current Chief Product Officer, Cameron Adams, reached out to investors before founding Canva in 2013.
After making some strategic acquisitions in Europe and hitting the milestone of 75 million monthly users in 2021, Canva became one of the world’s most valuable private software companies. The value went from $6 billion to $40 billion in less than 18 months.
A decade of inspiration for the world of design
After a decade in business and with the imminent launch of Visual Suite and AI tools, Canva is now the world’s only comprehensive visual communication platform. Individual creators, schools, nonprofits, and offices enjoy simple design, photos, collaboration features, video, and AI to differentiate themselves in an increasingly visual world.
Canva’s ease of use, collaborative capabilities, and breadth of product suite are in increasing demand around the world. More and more companies across a wide range of industries are using the platform, including 85% of the Fortune 500.
The company remains true to its true mission, which it encapsulates in a two-step plan: Step one is to build one of the most valuable companies in the world; Step two is to do as much good as possible.
Already, 400,000 nonprofits and 45 million teachers and students use Canva for free, partner with GiveDirectly to distribute $30 million in cash to Malawi’s needy, and 30% of profits go to charity. Thus, thanks to the progress made in step one, Canva is already able to realize its philanthropic ambitions in step two.
Canva sees no signs of slowing down in growth as it celebrates this important milestone.
SOURCE : BusinessWire
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