Deal focus: Canva’s simple design wins VC support

Perkins' first start-up, Fusion Books, was co-founded with Cliff Obrecht in 2008. It is an online tool allowing students, teachers and parents to collaborate on school yearbooks. Fusion became the largest yearbook publisher in Australia and launched in France and New Zealand.

"They have a lot of insights about the graphic design industry, particularly what the difficulties are for ordinary people. Melanie has a vision that everyone in the world can create beautiful designs easily," says Rick Baker, managing director of Blackbird Ventures, who met the founders at a conference in Perth with Bill Tai, a prominent US and Asia angel investor, in 2011.

Having proved themselves with a niche product, Perkins and Obrecht wanted to reach a wider market. This led to the creation of Canva in 2013. Through the cloud-based web platform and mobile app users can pick a standard layout, drop in fonts and images, then save and download the final design to file.

Baker and Tai introduced the founders to potential investors in a Silicon Valley event in 2013. They received $3 million in seed funding round from a group of high-profile angle investors including Seek co-founder Paul Bassat and Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman. Matrix Partners, InterWest Partners, 500 Startups and Blackbird committed institutional capital.

Last week, Canva raised a $6 million round led by existing Matrix and Shasta Ventures. Blackbird and Australian-based new investor AirTree Ventures also participated. This came after Founders Fund and Shasta put in $3.6 million last July.

"Canva is bringing exciting innovation to the mass market design space. It has impressive growth which shows it can become a major platform for digital design," says Tod Francis, managing director at Shasta. "We hope to help Canva with strategy and expansion in the US."

Over the past 20 months, approximately 2.5 million users have crated 20 million designs through Canva. It makes money through a "freemium" model - the platform is free to use but there is a catalog of special templates and higher quality images that cost $1 each. The new capital will go towards a paid subscription service, called Canva for Work, that targets large corporates.

Canva is one of a number of Australian technology start-ups to receive funding from US investors. Blackbird in particular likes to bring Silicon Valley-based players into funding rounds for its portfolio companies.

"We have invested in 17 companies and over 80% of them have US-based investors," Baker says. "It happens more sporadically and opportunistically in the earlier rounds, but in the later rounds it's becoming more common."

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• Topics
• Venture
• Australasia
• Technology
• Media
• Early-stage
• Australia
• Venture
• TMT
• Media
• Blackbird Ventures
• AirTree Ventures
• Matrix Partners
• Interwest Ventures