Canva Carries Out 7 Year Vision To Disrupt Digital Design

Seven years ago, CEO and Co-Founder of Canva, Melanie Perkins dreamt of empowering everyone to create beautiful designs without friction. That dream is now happening, according to plan. “We anticipated everyone would one day be using Canva, but it’s amazing to see it happen in reality,” said Perkins.

Canva is a cloud based web and iPad app that allows users to pick a template, choose a style, drag and drop fonts and images then quickly save and download the file. The app is sleek and swift. I have pumped out designs and published them in less than 10 minutes.

The Australian based start-up is pioneering the market, meeting the surge in demand by people who aren’t professional designers and don’t know Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, but want to be able to design for blogs and social media. Even a sheriff in the U.S. has made a ‘Wanted’ poster. Much of the growth has come from loyal advocates who have blogged about Canva or shared it on social media.

Over the past 20 months in its existence the product has amassed 2.3 million users with 65% joining in the last 6 months. An incredible 18.5 million designs have been created with 2.9 million in March alone.

Such solid traction has netted the startup a fresh US$6m of funding from top tier VCs: Matrix Partners and Shasta Ventures in the U.S. and Blackbird Ventures and AirTree Ventures in Australia. This brings the total amount of funding to US$13 million. Successful investor Bill Tai and Lars Rasmussen, Founder of Google Maps and Google Wave and now Director of Engineering at Facebook invested in the initial round of funding.

So far, Canva has been designed for individuals and uses a freemium model where designs can be created for free, but special templates and higher quality images can be purchased for $1 per each design.

Now Canva is unrolling its latest offering, ‘Canva for Work’, a product to help teams design together. “As the world becomes an increasingly visual place, the existing tools provided by Microsoft and Adobe no longer meet the needs of companies where everyone has to create high quality graphics and express their ideas visually. We couldn’t be more excited to announce ‘Canva for Work’, which we believe will transform the way every company works,” said Perkins.

Already 40% of Fortune 500 companies and 200,000 organizations use Canva, so the timing is natural to deliver a more work-friendly product. In a recent survey of 500 SME business owners in the U.S., 78% of companies said that people who are not professional designers create social media graphics, customer facing presentations, and other marketing materials.

Canva’s early success has been on the foundation of a stellar team. Guy Kawasaki, the former Chief Evangelist of Apple and esteemed author of 'The Art of the Start' is even a full-time Canva Evangelist. Lars Rasmussen and CTO Cameron Adams from Google were able to convince ex-Googlers to join the team and many strong java developers have also jumped over from Atlassian. The team is now 50 people with headquarters in Sydney and customer support in the Philippines.

One of the most impressive things to me about Canva’s story, is how the plan which has taken seven years to develop, has not really changed. In most startups, it’s virtually inevitable that the business will make several pivots either in product, business model or market. But without hesitation, Perkins said the plan has not waivered and most of what was pitched to early investors on a paper based pitch deck should be complete by next year.