Canva

Social media images and presentations are made using Canva, an Australian graphic design tool. The platform is free and provides premium memberships like Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise for greater capabilities. The software features ready-made templates for users to utilize. Canva introduced a video editing function in 2021. Users may also pay for the printing and delivery of tangible goods. The business has said that it plans to use internet and whiteboard solutions to compete with Google and Microsoft in the office software market.

Canva raised $60 million in June 2020 with a value of A$6 billion, almost twice that of 2019. Canva raised $200 million in September 2021, when its worth peaked at US$40 billion. The company's value reached a plateau in September 2022 at US$26 billion.

History

On January 1, 2013, Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adams established Canva in Perth, Australia. Canva has more than 750,000 users in its first year. Guy Kawasaki, a social media and technology guru, joined the business as its chief evangelist in April 2014. (brand promoter). Canva for Work, which specializes on marketing materials, was introduced in 2015.

Canva's sales climbed from A$6.8 million to A$23.5 million over the 2016–17 fiscal year, with a loss of A$3.3 million. The business turned a profit in 2017 and had 294,000 paying clients.

With receiving A$40 million from Sequoia Capital, Blackbird Ventures, and Felicis Ventures in January 2018, according to Perkins, the firm was valued at A$1 billion. Hostplus and Aware Super, two Australian superannuation funds, are well-known investors.

Canva received a further A$70 million in investment in May 2019 from General Catalyst and Bond as well as its current backers Blackbird Ventures and Felicis Ventures, valuing the firm at A$2.5 billion. Canva made an announcement and debuted an enterprise solution in October of the same year, announcing that company had funded an additional $85.2 million at a value of A$3.2 billion.

Canva for Education, a free solution for schools and other educational institutions designed to promote student and teacher collaboration, was introduced in December 2019 by Canva.

Canva announced a relationship with FedEx Office in June 2020, followed by Office Depot the following month. Canva was valued at A$6 billion as of June 2020, and A$40 billion by September 2021. Although though its valuation had decreased significantly—possibly by as much as 67%—from its 2021 peak to the middle of 2022, it was still regarded, along with Atlassian, as one of the "darlings" of the Australian IT industry. Co-founders Perkins and Obrecht have previously made public their intention to donate a large portion of their wealth to various charitable organizations.

data leak

A data breach involving about 139 million users of Canva happened in May 2019. Real identities of users, usernames, email addresses, location data, and password hashes for certain users were among the leaked data. Canva came under fire for its initial communication to clients that hid the information under boastful marketing copy. 4 million user passwords were decrypted and posted publicly later in January 2020. In response, Canva reset all users' passwords who hadn't updated them since the original incident.

Acquisitions

As part of its development into the presentations market, the business purchased presentations startup Zeetings in 2018 for an unknown sum.

Two free stock photography websites located in Germany, Pixabay and Pexels, were purchased by the firm in May 2019, giving Canva users access to their images for designs.

Canva purchased the Czech company Smartmockups and the Austrian business Kaleido.ai in February 2021.