In closing its latest funding round, Canva has seen its valuation surpass US$1 billion mark, making it the second Australian startup after Atlassian to obtain Unicorn status.
[See also: Let’s Talk… Growth (Is there anything wrong with aspiring to be a unicorn?), “We’ve only achieved 1% of what we know is possible,” says CEO of startup Canva and Australian start-up, Canva, named ‘coolest’ company in tech; but why does business need to be cool?]
The graphic design software startup, which is headquartered in Sydney, onboarded Sequoia Capital as its newest investor during a US$40 million round that saw it secure additional funding from existing shareholders Blackbird Ventures and Felicis Ventures.
CEO Melanie Perkins, who co-founded Canva with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams in 2012, told the Australian Financial Review that the funding would be used to build out the startup’s range of online design and publishing products. Despite having 294,000 paying customers and 10 million users across 190 countries, Perkins added that Canva had only achieved “about 1 per cent of what is possible”.
Perkins’ comment echoes what she previously told Dynamic Business for an exclusive article exploring the origins and rapid growth of her startup: “From the outside, it may appear as though Canva is fairly well established. Ten million users might sound like a lot, but it’s only 0.03% of the internet-using population. We’ve only done 1% of what we know is possible with Canva. There are still core pillars of our product mentioned in our pitch deck from [2012] that we’ve only started work on, so we have a long way to go yet!”