Australia’s Canva raises $70m at $2.5b valuation

Existing backers Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures also participated. It marks the debut investment for Bond, which raised a $1.2 billion fund earlier this year. Meeker, who served as an emerging technology analyst at Morgan Stanley for about 20 years until 2010, set up the firm after leaving Kleiner Perkins in September last year.

The round brings Canva’s total funding to date to about $150 million. This includes a $40 million investment led by Sequoia Capital last year. Other previous investors include Matrix Partners, Airtree Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Founders Fund, Square Peg Capital, 500 Startups, InterWest Partners, Seek co-founder Paul Bassat, and Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman.

Established in 2012 by Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht (pictured, center and left, with Cameron Adams, who subsequently joined the founding team), Canva offers a cloud-based platform and mobile app that allows users to create a custom-designed online presence. It is popular with marketers, non-profit organizations, bloggers, and the education sector.

The fresh capital will support the rollout of a new corporate branding product, Canva Enterprise. It coincides with the launch of a Netflix-style subscription service known as Photos Unlimited and the acquisition of two stock image providers, Pexels and Pixabay. These companies have more than one million images combined and have logged about 500 million downloads.

Canva has more than 15 million monthly active users, who have collectively created more than one billion designs, according to a statement. The company reportedly recorded a maiden profit of around A$1.8 million ($1.2 million) in 2017.

“In only five years it has not only demonstrated the need for a simpler way to design, but it is also one of the rarer cases of a tech start-up that is already profitable while growing incredibly quickly," Kyle Doherty, a managing director at General Catalyst, told The Sydney Morning Herald.

Later-stage venture funding in Australia has gathered momentum in recent years as homegrown technology companies begin to play higher profile roles in a local business culture traditionally dominated by primary industries. Other local start-ups to have claimed unicorn status include Atlassian, Aconex, and Airwallex, which achieved the milestone earlier this year.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Australasia
• Technology
• Consumer
• Media
• Expansion
• Australia
• General Catalyst
• Blackbird Ventures
• TMT