Canva

Canva offers a browser and mobile design platform for presentations, social media graphics, documents, video and websites, sold on a freemium model with paid Pro, Teams and Enterprise tiers. It was founded in January 2013 by Melanie Perkins, who is chief executive, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, and is headquartered in Sydney. The product grew out of Fusion Books, a school yearbook publishing system Perkins and Obrecht ran before Canva.

In March 2013 Canva raised $3 million in seed funding from Matrix Partners, InterWest Partners and 500 Startups, with angels including Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen and Bill Tai. In October 2015 Felicis Ventures led a $15 million Series A at a $165 million valuation, with Blackbird Ventures also backing the company. In January 2018 a $40 million round led by Sequoia Capital China valued Canva at $1 billion; the company had reached profitability in 2017 with 294,000 paying customers. In May 2019 it raised $70 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, adding General Catalyst and Bond alongside Felicis and Blackbird, bringing total funding to $166 million. In October 2019 it raised $85 million at $3.2 billion, with Bessemer Venture Partners among its listed investors. In September 2021 it raised $200 million at a $40 billion valuation.

Canva remains private. In July 2022 Blackbird Ventures marked its holding to an implied $25.6 billion valuation, a $14.4 billion cut, after adopting a mark-to-market methodology. In August 2025 an employee share sale valued the company at $42 billion. Canva reports more than 265 million monthly active users and 31 million paid users in 2025 and reached $4 billion in annualized revenue in early 2026. It has made acquisitions including Pexels and Pixabay in 2019, Flourish in 2022, and Serif (maker of Affinity) and Leonardo AI in 2024. Co-founder Cliff Obrecht said in September 2025 that a Nasdaq listing would not come before 2026 and that the company had no plans to list in Australia.

Canva illustrates a long private compounding path. Seed investors entered at a pre-revenue stage in 2013; Felicis led at a $165 million valuation; Sequoia Capital China entered at $1 billion in 2018. More than twelve years after founding there has been no IPO, so liquidity for early backers has come through secondary and employee share sales rather than a listing, and the Blackbird markdown shows how fund-level marks can move far from headline round prices.