Design juggernaut Canva – which is expected to IPO imminently – is now valued at $49 billion. The company was valued at $38.5 billion last year down from its high of $54.5 billion in 2021.
Key Takeaways
- Design juggernaut Canva has seen its valuation jump from $38.5 billion to $49 billion this week. That’s still behind its $54.5 billion valuation, which it reached in 2021.
- The platform has 200 million monthly active users and $2.5 billion in annualised revenue. 1,000 new ‘Canvanauts’ joined over the last 12 months.
- The company completed a US$1.6 billion secondary share sale in April this year as demand for its shares surged.
Key Background
- Canva moved into the enterprise market earlier this year
- It was valued at $54.5 billion in 2021
- 15 billion designs have been created on Canva
- The software is used in 190 countries and can be accessed in more than 100 languages
- More than 95% of the Fortune 500 companies use Canva
- Recent customers include HP, Atlassian, NYSE, and Ray White
Crucial Quotes
“We’ve recently completed a number of investor transactions at a valuation of US$32 billion, up from US$26 billion at our US$1.6 billion secondary sale in April this year. This comes as demand for Canva shares continues to surge,” a company statement reads.
Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s COO and one of three co-founders says it has been an extraordinary year of growth and increasing demand. “We’re really excited to be empowering more than 200 million people in 190 countries with the simplicity, access, and power of our product. While we’re incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made, we’re just getting started and we’re looking forward to a whole lot more to come,” says Obrecht.
Interesting fact
Canva acquired Australian AI startup Leonardo.AI for $374 million earlier this year. Leonardo had been operating for less than two years and was innovating at breakneck speed when it was brought into the Canva fold in July.
“Just over 18 months ago, we launched Leonardo.Ai with the vision of democratizing creativity with a cutting-edge Generative AI platform,” a Leonardo.AI company statement regarding the acquisition reads. “From the early days of easy model finetuning and customizable settings, we’ve been moving at pace to break new ground in the gen AI space, with a focus on providing exceptional control, speed and quality.”
Tangent
Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen loved founder Melanie Perkins’s idea for democratising design. “Even back then, Melanie said, ‘We’re going to build the biggest company in the world.’ I said, ‘You mean the biggest company in design, right?’ But she replied, ‘No. the biggest company in the world.’ I said, ‘Your mission is just too big,’” Rasmussen told Forbes Australia. “‘You need the best of the best of the best if you’re going to carry this out.’”
Airtree co-founder Craig Blair, an early investor in Canva, recalls meeting with Perkins, Obrecht, and Adams, a decade ago. ”Back in 2014 when we first met them, they pitched an incredibly broad vision, starting with democratising design, and leading into collaboration tools,” says Blair. “It felt like they were going to get into a head-to-head with mega-platforms like Google, and Microsoft and Salesforce. Now they’re doing what they said on that pitch day back in 2014. It’s been an incredible journey over the last decade, and they keep delivering on what they said they would do.”
A key part of what makes Canva so powerful is the ability to take content and convert it into different formats. “We’ve got the whole GPT integration. But I feel that’s all table stakes now and every product has got that,” COO Cliff Obrecht told Forbes Australia earlier this year. “The real power is how AI essentially allows you to do highly manual tasks in between doc types. So, the ability to take a whiteboard, convert it into a document, take a document, convert that into a presentation, take a presentation, convert them to a video, these are complex workflows that are exclusive to Canva.”
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