Australia's Canva sees valuation double once again

The latest round includes US-based investors T Rowe Price Global Technology Fund and Dragoneer Investment Group, as well as existing Australian backers Blackbird Ventures and Skip Capital, a firm associated with Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar. It is touted as having established Canva as one of the fastest-growing software companies in history.

In June last year, Canva raised a $60 million round, reportedly led by Blackbird and Sequoia Capital China, at a $6 billion valuation. This came only eight months after an $85 million round at a valuation of $3.2 billion led by Bond Capital, a vehicle launched by US venture capitalist Mary Meeker. General Catalyst, BVP India Investors, and Felicis Ventures have also made investments in the past three years.

Recent traction has been roundly attributed to a strategic shift toward enterprise-facing products at a time when businesses have been increasingly pressured to digitize their operations and manage decentralized teams. Traditionally, Canva’s flagship service has been a free online graphics toolbox for designers and entrepreneurs, but since the launch of Canva Enterprise in 2019, paid products for corporate branding and flexible workplace collaboration have become the core areas of operation.

Canva Presentations, a product suite that facilitates professional visual communications for globally dispersed teams, has come to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic. Company presentations now represent Canva’s fastest-growing use-case, with more than 250 million created to date. This is the equivalent of 600 presentations created via Canva software every minute. About 85% of Fortune 500 companies are said to be clients.

Canva offers more than 9,000 variously designed presentation templates, which have access to 100 million design elements in the form of photos, videos, audio tracks, and illustrations. Recent functionality improvements include a tool for conducting live Q&A sessions during remote presentations, templates specifically for presentations to be displayed on mobile devices, and infographics applications that can accommodate live data integrations.

The company claims to have been profitable since at least the first half of 2017, when a net profit of about $1.9 million was confirmed. Revenue during that six-month period was $25.1 million. Annualized revenue this year is said to be $500 million, up 130% from a year ago.

Meanwhile, operations have come to include 55 million monthly active users, three million of which are paying customers. The geographic footprint encompasses more than 190 countries, including North Korea and Antarctica, with products offered in over 100 languages. As of mid-2020, 55% of customers used the platform in languages other than English.

“Canva's growth is a testament to the company’s deep insight into the creative and communication needs of an ever-evolving workplace and its outstanding execution in delivering tools that help teams collaborate and present more effectively,” Christian Jensen, a partner at Dragoneer, said in a statement.

“It’s incredible to see what this nimble and passionate company from Sydney’s emerging tech hub has been able to achieve in such a short period of time. We believe that there are only a small handful of truly special companies being built at any given moment— and Canva is one of them.”

Australian B2B players have proven successful at leveraging “bottom-up” marketing techniques such as search engine optimization and viral features built into digital products. The trend has been attributed to global scaling advantages such as lower domestic competition in the early stages and familiarity with UK and US markets in terms of language and business culture.

Investment interest in Australian enterprise software has therefore expanded beyond the local ecosystem to increasingly include international involvement. Some of Canva’s earliest backers included Silicon Valley firms 500 Startups, Matrix Partners, and Shasta Ventures.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Technology
• Media
• Expansion
• Australia
• Blackbird Ventures
• enterprise software