Canva, a burgeoning graphic design startup out of Australia, announced this week it has raised $71 million in a fresh funding round that brings its total valuation to $15 billion, making it one of the fastest-growing companies of its kind, according to Canva. U.S. VC firms T. Rowe Price and Dragoneer participated in this latest investment.
Founded just eight years ago by rising star Melanie Perkins, Canva has quickly made a name for itself in the corporate space, providing a suite of design tools that help users “design like a pro,” even if they don’t have professional experience. Its simple drag-and-drop interface, wide selection of templates and massive library of stock photos, videos and fonts are designed to make graphic design easy and fun.
Many of these services are free, but major companies including American Airlines, Live Nation and Salesforce are just a handful of Canva’s three million paying customers.
A lot of Canva’s success has really just come in the last year or so. The company says it has surpassed $500 million in annualized revenue, a 130 percent year-over-year increase, which Canva attributes to an “enormous and underserved” market that has become “increasingly visual and distributed.”
“Canva’s growth is a testament to the company’s deep insight into the creative and communication needs of an ever-evolving workplace and its outstanding execution in delivering tools that help teams collaborate more effectively,” Dragoneer’s Christian Jensen said in a statement. “We believe that there is only a small handful of truly special companies being built at any given moment — and Canva is one of them. We are thrilled to be working with Canva as they enter their next phase of growth.”
In addition to the funding, Canva announced that it is rolling out a suite of new features for its flagship workplace product Presentations, offering new templates, live and mobile-first presentation capabilities, charts and infographics. Incidentally, presentations have become the company’s fastest growing use case, with more than 250 million created to date, so Canva is leaning into its corporate appeal even more.
“Now more than ever, teams and workplaces around the world need scalable, collaborative and easy-to-use visual communication products to empower them to achieve their goals,” Perkins said in a statement. “The launch of Presentations gives workplaces of all sizes a unique, flexible collaboration product that makes work feel like play. I’m incredibly proud of our rapidly growing team as we work together to empower the world to design.”
Today, Canva has about 1,500 employees worldwide, about 40 of which are based out of its Austin office. The office opened its doors last summer and marked the buzzy design startup’s first U.S. office presence. The company is growing its local team, with a handful of open tech positions available now.
