Canva is a $40 billion online design platform based in Australia
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Canva, an Australian graphic design company, has been valued at $40 billion (£29 billion), making it one of the world’s largest privately held corporations.
More clients worked from home during the epidemic, according to the online design platform. Just announced a new $200 million round of private equity funding, more than tripling the company’s worth in just five months. According to analysts, this makes it one of the most valuable start-ups in the world.
Canva is the fifth-most valuable start-up in the world, according to business data source CB Insights, behind China’s ByteDance, which owns TikTok, Jack Dorsey’s payment network Stripe, Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, and Swedish financial technology firm Klarna.
The funding also places its co-founders among Australia’s top ten wealthiest people.
Melanie Perkins, 34, and Cliff Obrecht, 35, both Australians, launched Canva in Sydney in 2013.
According to Forbes, they own around 36% of the company together.
They also declared on Wednesday that they planned to donate the vast bulk of the stock – roughly 30% of the company’s value – to charity causes.
Canva offers design templates for greeting cards, posters, resumes, and calendars, among other things.
On Wednesday, the company announced that its client base had grown to over 60 million customers in 190 countries, and that it was on course to generate $1 billion in revenue by the end of the year.
It claimed to have 500,000 paying customers, including Zoom, Salesforce, Paypal, Marriott International, and American Airlines, all of whom indicated they had boosted their use of Canva’s design technology in the previous year.
Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis, and AirTree Ventures were among the investors in the company’s most recent fund-raising round, which was led by global investment firm T.Rowe Price.
The company has also increased its personnel this year, with headquarters in Sydney and Manila, and plans to hire over 1,000 new people by 2021.
Canva is currently one of Australia’s most valued firms, having been profitable in 2017 and reaching a $1 billion valuation a year later.
Its market capitalization is comparable to that of publicly traded companies such as grocery behemoths Wesfarmers and Woolworths Group, as well as mining behemoth Fortescue Metals Group.