Canva, a website that started as a graphic design toolkit and expanded to include workplace collaboration spaces and templates for presentation decks, has solidified its standing as one of the fastest-growing tech companies with this week’s announcement that it has raised $200 million on a $40 billion valuation.
Canva’s valuation has more than doubled since April, when the company raised $71 million on a $15 billion valuation.
The Australia-based company was founded in 2012, but most of its growth has occurred more recently.
Canva has hired more than 1,000 people this year, doubling the global team to more than 2,000 employees. The company plans to again double its workforce to 4,000 in the next year.
About 75 of its employees are based in Austin, where Canva opened its first U.S. office last summer. The company is currently hiring for 14 positions in the Austin office.
The most recent funding round was led by T. Rowe Price and joined by new and existing strategic investors including Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis, and AirTree Ventures.
Canva is cashflow positive and has more than doubled its revenue year over year, according to the company. The company is on track to exceed $1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of this year.
“Visual communication has emerged as a universal need for teams of every size across almost every industry,” Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins said in a statement. “It has been incredible to see the continued growth of Canva across the globe over the last year. More than 60 million people are now using Canva for everything from launching startups to raising awareness for nonprofits, supporting remote learning, collaborating in distributed teams, and managing global enterprise brands at scale. We’re incredibly excited to be further accelerating our mission to truly empower the world to design.”
Canva features an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, a wide-ranging catalog of templates and an expansive library of stock photos, videos and fonts that are designed to make graphic design accessible to those without any training.
Canva has also emerged as a popular collaboration tool as companies have adopted remote workplaces. The number of business teams using Canva has quadrupled in the last year. The company has recently started scaling its enterprise product, attracting Fortune 500 clients like Zoom, Salesforce and PayPal.
“We’re looking forward to using Canva to manage our global brand assets and campaigns, all in one place. With millions of people around the world using Zoom, Canva will play an important role in helping us to continue scaling our brand and marketing efforts while empowering our rapidly growing team to create content at speed,” said Wendy Bergh, Zoom’s head of digital and online.
As business usage increases, presentations have quickly become one of the most popular uses for Canva, with more than six million presentations created each week. The number of presentations being created has more than tripled in the last year.
In the next year, Canva plans to expand its product portfolio, including a new video editor, responsive website creator and an offline mode set to launch later this year.
Perkins also announced Tuesday that she and co-founder Cliff Obrecht will commit the vast majority of their equity — 30 percent of Canva — to philanthropic causes through the Canva Foundation.
Perkins and Obrecht are launching their first pilot program with GiveDirectly, through which they plan to distribute $10 million to some of the world’s poorest people in Southern Africa, using mobile payments to reach those in need.
