Good morning! If you’re looking for 1 Smart Business Story, you’re in the right place, and we’ve got a corker.  
 
Today: Canva, the $42 billion company that’s turned everyone into a designer with its easy-to-use tools.  
 
CEO Melanie Perkins and her fellow co-founders reveal:  

I once used Canva to create a March Madness-style bracket of the most legendary businesspeople in Hollywood history. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve done with Canva’s tools? Let me know at [email protected].

Three Aussie founders built Canva by being very mindful of how they hire—and whom they keep.

BY JENNIFER CONRAD, SENIOR WRITER 

Rob Giglio says his Canva Challenge was the most fun he’s ever had during a job interview. Every potential hire goes through the exercise. Giglio, who was interviewing to become Canva’s chief customer officer, was asked to pitch a plan for how the company could reach $1 billion in B2B sales.

Giglio presented his plan with a slide show created in Canva, naturally—a platform with an aesthetic that leans heavily on a gradient palette of purple and turquoise, with a liberal use of emoji and clip art.

For 90 minutes, senior leadership grilled Giglio on his work, a process he relished. “It caused me to think about whether I thought Canva could do what they wanted to do,” adds Giglio, who previously held senior roles at Adobe, HubSpot, and Docusign. “If I didn’t think they could, it probably would’ve self- selected me out of the process.”

Canva, the Sydney, Australia-based design platform helmed by 38-year-old co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins, has no shortage of people who want to work there. With its web-native interface and AI-driven design and coding, Canva is steadily pecking away at other software firms’ dominance. Since its launch in 2013, the company has grown to more than 5,000 employees and offices in eight countries. In August, an employee stock sale valued the company at $42 billion, sparking buzz that it is preparing for an IPO.

Giglio came on board in April 2024, one month before the company introduced its enterprise version at the Canva Create event at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Canva hyped the launch with a huge production befitting the company’s drive for global success, which has made it the rare Australian startup to compete with major American software firms. Canva reports that as of October 2025, it has 260 million users, including 29 million monthly paid subscribers, and it has surpassed $3.5 billion in annualized revenue. It’s one of the most valuable tech companies to come out of Australia (along with Atlassian), and one of the most valuable female-founded and -led companies, period.

“When people use the platform for the first time, we want to give them everything at their fingertips to achieve their goals seamlessly,” says Perkins. While some professional designers might scoff at Canva, most people want to design a cool logo, slide deck, or brochure in an hour or two. The platform, with its millions of templates and point-and-click functionality, excels at that.

According to Bloomberg Intelligence, in 2024, Canva’s share of the $18.5 billion global creative software market was just 12 percent, while the publicly traded Adobe had captured about 66 percent. In September, Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss downgraded Adobe’s stock, noting its AI offerings had failed to keep pace with those of rivals like Canva, as well as Google and Meta. In another potential blow to Adobe, Canva acquired Affinity in 2024 and recently made its professional-grade photo, layout, and design tools free for everyone.

As AI tools increasingly change how designs are made, Perkins sees her company at the forefront of machine- enhanced creativity. Around 2017, Canva began building its team of data scientists, engineers, and machine learning experts and using AI on the back end to suggest templates and design elements. In 2019, Canva began offering its first user-facing AI tool, a background-remover feature.

The company has since invested heavily in building custom AI features, acquiring AI firms, and incorporating models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the background. Each product update has expanded Canva’s AI offerings: text and image generation tools in 2022; vibe-coding tools and spreadsheet formula generation in 2025.

“AI is one of those empowering pieces of technology because it enables people to go further with their ideas and get a far more polished result,” says Cameron Adams, Canva’s 45-year-old co-founder and chief product officer. Today, the company has a “massive” AI team, Adams says, who are “all thinking about the latest AI technology—how we weave it into our product, and how we make it useful to our customers.”

But since the first chatbots for generating images and text became publicly available around 2022, companies have raced to harness the powers of generative AI to create images, text, videos, and code in seconds. Legacy players, including Microsoft and Google, and social platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, regularly add new AI features. Design software firm Figma (13 million monthly active users as of March 2025) and workplace collaboration tool Notion (more than 100 million monthly active users) offer AI-first products that have been a hit with younger customers.

For Canva to keep tracking toward its goal of a billion users, it will need to bring in a lot more of those corporate accounts Giglio was hired to bring in. Large firms are often locked into long-term contracts with software vendors, and CTOs may be wary of adding new tools to their tech stacks. Giglio says Canva usually spreads through word of mouth. Eventually, individual employees or teams might upgrade to the Pro version. “The next thing you know, there’s a large footprint inside a company,” says Giglio. “We take that as a signal.”

Each new hire at Canva receives a 51-page slide deck that outlines the company’s values (“Make complex things simple!”) and the hundreds of millions of dollars that Canva gives to charity. Within the deck are videos of Canvanauts, as employees call themselves, doing the Macarena and playing with Hula-Hoops.

But it would be a mistake to think Canva’s culture is all rainbow clip art and dance parties. There’s a hard-driving intensity to build the best products. The celebrations featured prominently in the deck kick off ambitious projects. Another of the company’s values is memorialized on Giglio’s laptop in a sticker: “Set crazy big goals and make them happen.”

Not everyone makes the cut. Employees let go during the six-month probationary period regularly vent on LinkedIn and Reddit. Cliff Obrecht, Canva co-founder and COO, reportedly said at a conference last year that to stay competitive in an ever- evolving tech landscape, the company should take a “wartime” approach to staffing, including showing employees with poor performance reviews the door.

“People want to be part of a winning team at a winning company,” says Obrecht, 39, who is married to Perkins. “You can have the most kumbaya, everyone’s-family culture in the world, but if you’re not winning as a company, that means jack shit.”

To that end, Canva recently named a former Roblox and Adobe exec to be its head of AI research, and has been encouraging its workers to adopt AI in their day-to-day work. “We don’t just want to be participants in the AI revolution,” says Obrecht. “We want to be leaders.”

Perkins and Obrecht met as students at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Perkins had a part-time job teaching classmates to use Adobe’s design tools. “The students found them intimidating. They’d feel stupid if they didn’t understand how to utilize something,” Perkins remembers. There had to be an easier way, she thought, and so she and Obrecht set out to build one.

In 2007, the pair left school and founded Fusion Books, an online platform for designing school yearbooks. Within a few years, it was bringing in over $1 million in annual revenue. That success led them to develop Canvas Chef, a suite of affordable, accessible tools for the entire design world. Back then, faster internet speeds, cloud computing, and social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram enabled a new visual-first form of online communication. But being based in Perth, Perkins and Obrecht had little exposure to the tech world and knew nothing about venture capital.

They got their first window into that world in 2010, when Bill Tai, a Silicon Valley investor who made early bets on TweetDeck and Zoom, came to town to judge a pitch competition. The couple lost, but Tai invited them to stay in touch. “Melanie had a healthy disrespect for the system and a healthy naivete in that she didn’t know she couldn’t do it,” he says.

In 2011, Perkins flew to California to have lunch with Tai. He helped arrange an introduction to Cameron Adams, a Sydney-based, former Google user- interface designer. Their skill sets seemed complementary, and over a Skype call in July 2012, he agreed to join forces with Perkins and Obrecht, who had recently relocated to Sydney. In early 2013, Tai took part in a $1.5 million seed round, and Canva, as it was now called, received a $1.5 million matching grant from the Australian government.

Wesley Chan, another early investor, met with the founders on a layover in Sydney in 2013, and got so caught up in talking to them that he missed his connecting flight to San Francisco and stayed on for three more days. Chan calls his investment in Canva a “cowboy deal.” Canva had been rejected more than 100 times during its initial fundraising, and there were many reasons not to invest: The transaction price was high for a company with no revenue, the user churn rate was high, and two of the founders were romantically involved.

But Chan, who had been Sergey Brin’s chief of staff at Google, saw one major reason to invest: Canvas’s leadership team reminded him of Google’s founders, Brin and Larry Page, who also struggled to raise money; people believed they were crazy to think the company could make money by simplifying search. Like that of Google’s founders, Perkins, Obrecht, and Adams’s “vision was big—they have a hundred-year plan.”

Chan adds, “They’re very picky [with hiring]. You have to fit the culture really well and really believe.” Similar to early Googlers, he also adds, Canvanauts may go out to happy hours or celebrate staff birthdays, but they clock in a few more hours at their desks afterward.

For the first five years, Canva was so tiny that no one wanted to join the board, Obrecht says. Now the board includes Disney CEO Bob Iger, who invested in 2021. “Canva’s products stand out as both timely and deeply relevant,” Iger tells Inc. “My support for Canva comes from complete faith and appreciation in its founders and their vision.”

The company, which is still private, has raised a little over $600 million to date, according to PitchBook. It has been profitable since 2017, and reached a $1 billion valuation the following year. It reported $2.5 billion in revenue in 2024.

Perkins attributes Canva’s sustained growth to aligning the company with long- and short-term goals and identifying the steps it will take each year to achieve them. For example, Perkins says one of the company’s mission pillars is to “empower everyone to design in every language.” While many American tech firms wait years to expand their offerings overseas, Canva thought globally from day one, a result of being a company with big ambitions with a relatively small domestic market. In 2014, it opened its first office outside of Australia, in the Philippines, and today it has offices in the U.S., the U.K., the Czech Republic, Austria, China, and New Zealand. Canva is available in 100 languages, and more than half of its customers use it in a language other than English.

“When we look back, all the things that we’ve done have been snowballing and contributing to our mission pillars,” says Perkins. “Some of them we’re getting pretty close to achieving now, which is pretty incredible.”

Sydney is about 7,000 miles from Silicon Valley, which gives Canva a healthy distance from shifting investor sentiment and the pressure to make money at all costs. While American tech firms are often projections of their founders’ outsize egos, Perkins, Obrecht, and Adams seem happy to focus on work. “We’ve been able to stay out of that fray a bit,” says Perkins.

Perkins did not directly address the rumors of a potential IPO, but given the amount of money Canva has raised, investors are surely anticipating a major exit. In July, Figma went public at a $19.3 billion valuation; Figma’s annual revenue in 2024 was $749 million—less than a third of Canva’s the same year.

In November 2024, Canva hired Kelly Steckelberg, who previously guided Zoom through its IPO, as chief financial officer. Steckelberg is focused on the accounting procedures and “all the things the founders and our eventual investors want to be running like clockwork,” she says, which would be required of a public company. Steckelberg hopes to have the corporate finance team ready by the start of 2026, but says that Canva is not under shareholder pressure to go public immediately.

Going forward, Adams believes that a major use case for AI will be managing workflows, generating ideas, identifying steps to execute those ideas, and automating many of those steps. But as Canva expands into a little bit of everything—like a Microsoft Office suite for the extremely online—can it do all of it well?

The answer may come with the new AI tools announced at an October 30 keynote in Sydney in front of a crowd of 3,500, including Canvanauts who’d toiled for months on the new features. A funk band played, Australia’s second most famous drag queen gave a brief talk on AI models, and Canva introduced its proprietary Canva Design Model, which generates editable designs from text prompts.

While the tools may evolve, Perkins says the vision behind them hasn’t changed since she was a teenager: “The objective has always been to enable people to take their idea, turn that into a design, and have zero friction between those two points.”