Before the arrival of Canva in 2013, the most popular design tools were arguably Photoshop and Adobe. You can only use either of them if you have experience. Then Canva came and boom everybody became a designer. With an easy and simple interface cum template, you do not require any special skills to use this online design tool.
Over the years, it has gained traction and has now become a unique tool for design. Check out their numbers-More than 7 billion designs have been created, 120 new designs are created every second using Canva’s expansive library of more than 800,000 templates and over 100 million design ingredients, including photos, videos, stickers, audio tracks, and illustrations. Additionally, it has 60 million monthly active users in 190 countries.
Today, Canva, founded by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams is announcing that it has raised $200 million led by investment management firm T.Rowe Price.
New and existing investors also participated in the round, including Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis, and AirTree Ventures. The funding values the design firm at $40 billion.
The new investment round of funding will be used to accelerate this continued growth, including expanding Canva’s team of more than 2,000 employees, which the company expects to double in the year ahead.
“Visual communication has emerged as a universal need for teams of every size across almost every industry,” explains Canva co-founder and CEO, Melanie Perkins.
“It has been incredible to see the continued growth of Canva across the globe over the last year. More than 60 million people are now using Canva for everything from launching startups to raising awareness for nonprofits, supporting remote learning, collaborating in distributed teams, and managing global enterprise brands at scale. We’re incredibly excited to be further accelerating our mission to truly empower the world to design.”
“The need for both visual communication and online collaboration has become increasingly paramount and is driving Canva’s exceptional growth and adoption in teams and workplaces of every size and across many industries,” said Alan Tu, portfolio manager of T. Rowe Price Global Technology Fund. “We’re pleased to extend our investment supporting Canva on its mission to democratise visual communication.”
Canva provides a free online visual communications and collaboration platform featuring a drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates ranging from presentations, social media graphics, posters, apparel to videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage, and audio clips. The service is available on desktop, web, iOS, and Android.
