Canva

The idea for Canva grew out of Fusion Books, a company previously founded by Melanie Perkins. Launched in 2007, it was an online publishing system that let schools collaborate on yearbooks; she ran it with Cliff Obrecht, later Canva’s co-founder and chief operating officer, and by 2013 it held 10 percent of the Australian yearbook market and had expanded to New Zealand and France.⁠[1][1]

In 2012 Perkins’s team decided to take Fusion Books’ technology to a larger market and began developing Canva, rebuilding the technology in HTML5 for both web and iPad, with the aim of letting people without design skills create designs. Cameron Adams, a former Google employee, was a co-founder.⁠[1][2][1][1][1]

In March 2013 Canva, then still in stealth, announced $3 million in seed funding from Matrix PartnersMatrix PartnersMatrix Partners, now branded Matrix, is a US early-stage venture capital firm with roots in Hellman, Ferri Investment Associates, established in 1977. Matrix was founded in 1982 and invests in technology companies from the idea stage through Series A.Open the full entry, InterWest Partners, 500 Startups and angel investors including Google Maps founder Lars Rasmussen, Bill Tai and Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman. The team then had nine full-time employees in Sydney.⁠[1][1][1]

Canva launched its product in 2013, initially as a free product, and gradually added enterprise features. At its core were a simple drag-and-drop interface with large numbers of templates and a library of content including fonts, images, GIFs and videos.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In January 2018 Canva received a $40 million investment led by Sequoia China at a valuation of $1 billion, with Blackbird Ventures and Felicis Ventures participating. The company had reached profitability in 2017 with 294,000 paying customers, and about 10 million people in 190 countries used its tools. Perkins said the company’s first target was PowerPoint.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

In May 2019 Canva joined forces with the free stock libraries Pexels and Pixabay, adding more than a million free images for users, and launched Photos Unlimited, an all-you-can-use premium stock photo subscription at $12.95 a month; it then raised $70 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, with General Catalyst and Bond joining as new investors.⁠[4][4][4][4]

On May 24, 2019, the hacking group GnosticPlayers breached Canva and stole about 139 million user records, including usernames, real names, email addresses and location information; the breach became public only after the hackers told ZDNet. SiliconANGLE reporter Duncan Riley criticized Canva for being slow to notice the intrusion, for burying the details of its email to users under marketing content, and for an FAQ page that offered little substance.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5]

In its FAQ page Canva said it was working with a forensics team specializing in such attacks and with the FBI to determine what happened, and would implement every possible safeguard to prevent a recurrence; the stolen passwords were encrypted with bcrypt.⁠[5][5][5]

In September 2021 Canva raised $200 million at a $40 billion valuation in a round led by T. Rowe Price, with Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks CapitalGreenoaksGreenoaks is an American investment firm co-founded by Neil Mehta in 2012 and known for concentrated, long-term investing; it made an early, large bet on the Korean e-commerce company Coupang and has invested in companies including Wiz, Stripe, Databricks, and Anthropic. In May 2026, it co-led Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H funding round with Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, and Sequoia Capital.Open the full entry, Dragoneer, Blackbird, Felicis and AirTree participating. It then had more than 60 million monthly active users in 190 countries, more than 500,000 paying teams and about 2,000 employees, and expected to exceed $1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2021. Perkins said Canva wanted to “replace PDF,” focusing on collaboration rather than competing with professional vector design software.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

Amid the tech downturn of 2022, three major venture investors, Blackbird, Square Peg and AirTree, cut the valuation of their Canva holdings by 36 percent from the 2021 peak.⁠[6]

In October 2023 Canva integrated RunwayRunwayRunway (Runway AI, Inc.) is a New York–based artificial intelligence company that grew out of the ITP program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2018. It develops video generation models and tools for the film, advertising and creative industries, has released the Gen-1 through Gen-4.5 series of models, and has extended its research to “general world models” that simulate the world in real time.Open the full entry’s Gen-2 video generation model into its Magic Media app, bringing AI video generation to its then 150 million monthly users.⁠[7]

In March 2024 Canva acquired Serif, developer of the professional design suite Affinity (Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher), in a cash-and-stock deal, with all of Serif’s roughly 90 employees joining; Affinity then had more than 3 million users and was seen as an alternative to Adobe Creative Cloud. Canva said the deal would advance its enterprise ambitions and that it had no plans to change Affinity’s subscription-free model.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][8]

In July 2024 Canva acquired the Sydney generative AI company Leonardo.ai for cash and stock; all 120 of its employees joined, and Leonardo continued to operate independently. Co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams said the deal would help Leonardo expand its API business and invest in foundational model research. Canva had previously committed $200 million over several years to pay creators who consent to having their content used to train the company’s AI models.⁠[9][9][9][9][9]

In September 2024 Canva notified Canva Teams customers that subscription prices would rise by about 300 percent the following year: an email shared by one user showed the annual price going from $119.99 to a “discounted” $300 for the first year and $500 a year thereafter, and in Australia Canva Teams moved from a flat price for up to five users to per-user pricing. Users criticized the increase on X, Threads and Reddit.⁠[10][10][11][10][11]

A Canva spokesperson said the increase reflected the value of the company’s expanded product experience and that its product suite had grown significantly over the past few years; affected customers would receive 12 months at a 30 percent discount, and the old prices dated from the product’s 2020 launch, had not changed since and had long been unavailable to new customers.⁠[10][11][11][11]

In October 2024 Canva’s valuation rose by nearly a quarter to $32 billion through secondary market share sales.⁠[6][12]

On August 19, 2025, Canva launched an employee share sale valuing the company at $42 billion, led by existing shareholder Fidelity with J.P. Morgan Asset Management joining as a new investor; current and former employees could each sell up to $3 million of vested equity at $1,646.14 per share, and the company said the round was significantly oversubscribed. Canva then reported annualized revenue of $3.3 billion and more than 240 million monthly active users, 27 million of them paying.⁠[13][13][12][13][13][12]

In October 2025 Canva introduced its “Creative Operating System,” built around its own Design Model for understanding design layout and editable content, updated its video, email and form tools, and announced that the new Affinity would be free to all users. Perkins said the world was moving from the “Information Era” to the “Imagination Era.” Canva then had more than 260 million monthly users.⁠[14][14][14][14][14][14]

In August 2026 early investors Blackbird and Airtree had external valuers mark Canva down 17 percent to $34.9 billion, and the independent valuation for employee share grants fell from $38.9 billion a year earlier to about $31 billion. In her second-quarter 2026 update to shareholders, Perkins said that because the “average cost of serving an AI task was too high” and the platform was relying too heavily on frontier models, the company had slowed new product rollouts, rebuilt its architecture and reduced unit costs, cutting its revenue growth forecast from 30 percent to 20 percent, which she called a “deliberate decision to get the economics right.”⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

Blackbird partner Rick Baker said he remained optimistic about Canva, saying it had cut the cost of serving AI by 90 percent. Gary Tian, professor of finance at Macquarie University, said slower growth and higher costs made a premium valuation harder to defend and that the planned listing, previously targeted around 2027, might be delayed. In the quarter to June 2026, Canva’s revenue grew 25.2 percent year on year to $921.9 million, and it had been profitable for nine years.⁠[6][15][15][15][6][6]

On September 30, 2026, at the Runway AI Summit in San Francisco, Canva’s head of AI research Stefano Corazza joined ElevenLabs chief revenue officer Ashley KramerAshley KramerAshley Kramer is a technology executive who has been chief revenue officer of the voice AI company ElevenLabs since September 2026. She previously led enterprise sales at OpenAI and earlier served as chief marketing and strategy officer of GitLab, chief product officer and chief marketing officer of Sisense, and senior vice president of product and marketing at Alteryx.Open the full entry and Nebius chief marketing officer Lindsey IrvineLindsey IrvineLindsey Irvine is a technology marketing executive who has been chief marketing officer of the AI cloud company Nebius since August 2026. She previously led global marketing at Square and served as chief marketing officer of the biotech R&D software company Benchling and of MuleSoft, a Salesforce company.Open the full entry on a panel titled “Building, Selling and Implementing Creativity at Scale,” about what it takes to build, ship and commercialize AI products that creative professionals actually adopt and pay for.⁠[16][16][16][16]

Canva: Official website: https://www.canva.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

X: Public account: https://x.com/canva (opens in a new window)⁠[17]