Canva Raises $200 Million At A $40 Billion Valuation

Following a fresh $200 million funding, online graphic design company, Canva, is now valued at $40 billion, making it one of the world’s biggest privately-owned companies. The funding round was led by T. Rowe Price and saw the participation of new and existing investors, including Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis, and AirTree Ventures.

According to business data provider CB Insights, Canva’s $40 billion valuation makes it the fifth-most valuable start-up in the world, behind TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, payment platform Stripe, Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX and Swedish financial technology firm Klarna.

On Wednesday, Canva announced that it intended to give about 30 percent of the company’s wealth away to charitable causes. The firm said that it had grown its customer base to over 60 million users in 190 countries and that it was on its way to realizing $1 billion in revenue by the end of the year. It also said that it had 500,000 paying customers, including corporate clients like Zoom, Salesforce, Paypal, Marriott International, and American Airlines, which the firm said had all increased their use of Canva’s design technology in the past year.

Talking about the number of companies taking up its software, Canva, in a press release, said that “from large enterprises to small businesses, the shift to distributed working has seen team adoption more than quadrupled over the last 12 months”.

Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins and her team started working on Canva in 2012 and launched the product in 2013. Simply put, Canva allows anyone to design anything for free, including greetings cards, resumes, posters, etc; a technique that has proved incredibly fruitful for the company. Although Canva launched as a free product, it has, over time, introduced features that users have to pay for.

With the newly raised capital, Canva plans to double its workforce in the next year. This year alone, the company has doubled its workforce, hiring more than 1,000 new employees.

In addition to increasing its workforce, the company has intentions to further expand the product by launching website design next year. This will allow users to turn existing and new presentations and designs into a website, and even search for and buy a domain for that site. Canva is also working on a new video editor and an offline mode.