Canva
Sydney-based design and visual communication platform founded in 2013 by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, with more than 265 million monthly users at the end of 2025.
Industry: Online design software | Location: Sydney, Australia | Founded: 2013 | Total Funding: USD 145M
About Canva
Canva is an online design and visual communication platform headquartered in Sydney, Australia. It was founded in 2013 by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams. Perkins serves as chief executive and Obrecht as chief operating officer. The platform lets individuals, small businesses and larger organisations create documents, presentations, social media graphics and other visual content, and it has increasingly added artificial intelligence tools under its Magic Studio suite. Canva's funding history shows steep valuation growth. In October 2019 it raised US$85 million in a round led by a venture firm headed by Mary Meeker, at a valuation of US$3.2 billion. A US$60 million round in 2020 valued the company at US$6 billion, and a US$200 million raise in 2021 valued it at US$40 billion, with the company reporting more than 60 million users in 190 countries at that point. In August 2025 an employee share sale led by Fidelity valued Canva at US$42 billion, according to Startup Daily; eligible current and former employees could sell up to US$3 million of stock, and the chief executive said annualised revenue stood at US$3.3 billion. On scale, research firm Sacra estimated that Canva reached about US$4 billion in annual recurring revenue at the end of 2025, up 43 percent from US$2.8 billion a year earlier, with about 265 million monthly active users and 31 million paid subscribers. Other reports put 2025 revenue at US$3.5 billion and monthly users at 260 million, so figures differ by source. Canva has expanded through acquisitions. It bought Affinity, the professional photo, illustration and page-layout software suite, in March 2024, and announced the purchase of the generative AI platform Leonardo.ai in July 2024. In January 2025 it acquired the advertising analytics company MagicBrief. Reports from early 2026 describe further deals, including the motion design tool Cavalry and the AI ad-optimisation firm MangoAI in February, Doohly in March, and Ortto and Simtheory ahead of its Canva Create event in April 2026, where it introduced Canva AI 2.0 in research preview with agentic tools that can run recurring design tasks in the background. In the Middle East, Canva signed an agreement with the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy in February 2026, at the World Governments Summit, to set up its regional headquarters in Dubai and to support 250,000 small and medium-sized enterprises and individuals over five years. The agreement was signed by Cliff Obrecht for Canva. Ahmed Iqbal is the company's managing director for the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan, and a May 2026 job listing described a Dubai-based enterprise sales role as the first of its kind on the ground in the region.
Leadership
- Melanie Perkins, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
- Cliff Obrecht, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer
- Cameron Adams, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer
- Kelly Steckelberg, Chief Financial Officer
- Nirmal Govind, Chief Algorithms Officer