How Melanie Perkins Led Canva To Become $40 Billion Design Unicorn

Canva, the world's most valuable female-led startup, was conceptualised by its CEO, Melanie Perkins, when she got frustrated with complicated graphic design tools. Back in 2008, Perkins, who lacked technical training, wanted to create a tool which was simple, online and collaborative.

From that idea, Canva was born, and its valuation reached $40 billion in 2021, generating $3 billion in annual revenue. Now Perkins enjoys the crown of leading the world’s most valuable female-led startup. Perkins and her husband, co-founder Cliff Obrecht, each held a $5.9 billion stake in the company as of 2021.

"Facebook was taking off at the time – people could jump in and use that so easily, and yet design tools took years of training to learn," Bloomberg cited her 2018 Medium post. "I wanted to make design software simple, online and collaborative."

Based in Sydney, Canva stands as a global design powerhouse. Despite being relatively new in the sector, Canva is credited with challenging Adobe’s long-standing dominance.

However, Canva’s journey to success was far from easy. When Perkins co-founded the company over a decade ago, she had no technical background. Young, non-technical, and based in Australia, she faced rejection from over 100 investors.

But launched in 2013, today the platform serves more than 230 million users.

Before launching Canva, Perkins, now 38, was a part-time design tutor in 2008. According to Forbes, Perkins is a university dropout and left the University of Western Australia in 2009. Perkins’ LinkedIn account suggests that before launching Canva, she founded ‘Fusion Books’ in 2007. The Perth-based company is an online publishing system, which enables people to create yearbooks.

Notably, Perkins and her husband, Obrecht, have pledged to transfer more than 80% of their stake to the Canva Foundation for charitable causes.

Like all major tech players, Canva is also racing to lead in the artificial intelligence space. In April, the company announced the launch of Canva Code, a generative AI coding platform designed to help users prototype apps and other digital products.