The contemporary technological industry is more fitting to define it as grief is everywhere. Slowing performance, halving share values, and enormous layoffs were the result. Is the Internet bubble likely to pop, and are businesses still growing? Many people have recently been looking for technology companies that are still moving forward steadily during this cold winter. Canva, which is valued at $40 billion and ranks fifth on the global unicorn list, is one of them.
Canva is an Australian online design platform that was founded in 2012. According to CB Insights, Canva is the world's fifth largest unicorn, after only ByteDance, SpaceX, Shein, and Stripe. Canva recently announced that the platform's monthly active users had officially surpassed 100 million, and it also began to enter the field of office software to compete with Google and Microsoft.
Canva is one of the few large-scale technology firms created by female entrepreneurs. Canva is the only firm led by a female CEO among the top ten technology unicorns in the world. Canva was founded in less than ten years and is now worth $40 billion. Its users have now spread to over 190 countries, and they are still going wild in the current cold winter. So, how did Canva come to be, and what drives the company's continued explosive growth?
Fool-style design mode, creating a 40 billion business empire
Simply said, Canva is an online design tool with a subscription fee, similar to other Sass companies. But the most important characteristic of Canva is that it has a very vast user base. Whether you are a student party, a professional, a team, or a large, medium, or small organization, you may use Canva to meet your design demands. It is important to note that the term "design needs" does not only refer to professional design work that involves artistic creation and typesetting, but also includes a picture, designing your own business card or greeting card, creating a course presentation PPT or personal resume, editing a video, and almost any other design scenario you may encounter in your life.
Classification of various design scenarios listed on the Canva website
Canva's founding idea is to be a design platform that anybody can use. It offers a big quantity of licensed images, creative graphics, and other high-quality design templates to customers. Users are not required to have any prior knowledge of art. They merely need to select a template and then make a few basic changes to produce individual masterpieces. Create a range of tall-looking design pieces. Canva supports one-click saving of works on mobile phones, and computers, or sharing with friends, unlike many similar platforms that have various restrictions on the export of works after the design is completed. Canva also has YouTube tutorial videos to teach "Xiao Bai" how to complete the design for a variety of design needs.
Canva now offers three subscription packages for individual and corporate users: free, pro, and teams. The templates in the free edition are enough for the ordinary user. As a result, while Canva did not launch on a large scale in its early stages, word of mouth from free users quickly accumulated the platform's first batch of users.
Canva has since created a product-driven flywheel effect by steadily growing the number of templates and image libraries, as well as expanding its business limits into visual industries such as image and video processing. Canva has created a full design ecosystem after over 10 years of development, allowing the platform to grow swiftly. Canva had only 150,000 customers when it went public in January 2014, but it expects to have 75 million by early 2022. Its monthly active users had surpassed 100 million as of last month. Canva's customers include TikTok, Google, Amazon, and other significant technology organizations. Canva's client coverage of Fortune 500 firms has surpassed 80%, and more than 150 designs are created every second.
Not only to revolutionize Adobe's life but also to challenge Microsoft and Google
Looking back at Canva's development curve, it is clear that its tremendous expansion happened mostly during the outbreak. Canva's user base has expanded tenfold between 2019 and 2021, five rounds of funding have been completed, and its valuation has risen from $6 billion at the end of 2019 to $40 billion. Canva has already surpassed its direct competitor Adobe in terms of monthly active users, with 100 million. According to statistics, Adobe Creative Cloud has roughly 25 million subscribers, which is barely a fifth of Canva's.
After Canva debuted the Visual Worksuite function in September of this year, its utilization scenarios were substantially broadened, directly leading the number of Canva users to soar by 15 million in a single month in October. Canva has begun to go into a bigger sector of visual office if it has accomplished its objective of a design platform that everyone can use in the last ten years. Canva's new Worksuite suite includes design papers, whiteboards, presentations, video editing, web page publishing, and other plate services. Many people associate the term Worksuite with Google Workspace and Microsoft Office Suite.
Canva, in contrast to Google and Microsoft, is attempting to blend visual design with online office activities. To provide an example, Google Doc now only provides customers with an online Word function, but Canva Doc integrates its extensive design library with document editing. Including images, videos, tables, and other media dramatically enhances the functionalities of the document and improves its appearance.
Canva's products not only have the same function as Google Workspace, which allows multi-person teams to remotely display, edit, and share works, but they also have more powerful functions and in-depth analysis tools, such as multi-platform operations, one-click export, traffic analysis, and questionnaires. Furthermore, when compared to Google and Microsoft's traditional office suite tools, Canva offers more subdivided tools such as whiteboard, presentation, video production, and so on. Canva has previously been well-liked by users with design needs, and the release of the Worksuite series of functions this time undoubtedly adds fuel to Canva's entry into the general market.
Microsoft has certainly taken notice of Canva's high-profile foray into the business arena. Microsoft hurried to introduce Designer, a visual picture creation program, just after Canva reported last month that it had exceeded 100 million monthly active users. Overall, the program immediately competes with Canva, which also allows users to utilize templates for quick design, make posters, logos, and banners, among other things, and offers free and premium versions that are included in Microsoft's Office Family Bucket.
After 100 rejections, deduce her power of her in the technology world
Many people did not anticipate a young woman to be the driving force behind Canva's ten-year rise from nothing to $40 billion, which made Microsoft nervous. Melanie Perkins, 35, is not just one of Australia's richest female entrepreneurs, but also the world's most influential female entrepreneur in technological start-ups. And she was only 19 years old when she came up with the idea for Canva.
Melanie Perkins has no technological experience; she studied Communication, Psychology, and Business at the University of Western Australia. During her college years, she worked part-time as a private tutor teaching students how to do graphic design and discovered that Adobe, which has a monopoly position, has a high threshold for use and is expensive for the student party. As a result, the idea of creating a design platform that does not require technical knowledge and is accessible to all began to germinate in her mind.
Melanie, unlike many others, doesn't just think about it. After developing a comprehensive strategy, she chose to drop out of school at the age of 19 to co-found Fusion Books with her then-classmate and future husband Cliff Obrecht. They began by focusing on the school yearbook industry, providing a library of design templates that allow students to create their school yearbooks with simple drag-and-drop tools. Fusion Books grew to become Australia's largest yearbook design company, and the company extended to France and New Zealand. Melanie soon realized, however, that the market for yearbooks was too small, and she desired to be a design platform that empowered a broader field of visual design.
Who cares about a tiny girl in her early twenties who dropped out of school to establish a business?
Melanie subsequently stated that she had visited over 100 investors and institutions in Australia, but she was met with closed doors one after the other, and no one was ready to invest in Canva for up to three years. In 2011, she finally waited for the noble person on the road to Canva's business development - Bill Tai, a well-known Silicon Valley investor who had previously invested in Twitter and Zoom. Melanie used the opportunity to explain her Canva idea to Bill Tai during a dinner party at a startup competition awards ceremony in Perth.
Although Melanie did not receive investment from this conversation at the time, her entrepreneurial zeal left an indelible impression on Bill Tai, who invited her and her team to Silicon Valley to attend an investor gathering, which is the reason for this conversation. She met Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Maps, at the party and received his first intentional investment.
Lars Rasmussen, on the other hand, believed that neither Melanie nor Cliff Obrecht had a technical background and hoped they could find a technical lead, introducing them to Cameron Adams, a former Google employee who was starting his own business at the time. Adams was first uninterested in the proposal of this young Australian lady. Melanie wrote a long letter to Adams after learning about it, detailing her experience, determination, and plan for Canva, and ultimately impressing Adams with her sincerity and ability.
Canva's technological limitations were compensated for by the acquisition of Adams, and Lars Rasmussen's investment helped Canva to finally gain the attention of investment institutions. Canva has since received investments from significant institutions like as Sequoia Capital and Disney. Canva's total financing has already surpassed $500 million US dollars. Since 2022, several technology-based growth enterprises that are quickly rising in the pandemic, such as Canva, have suffered one after the other. Some appraisals have been violated, and some have conducted significant layoffs. However, Canva's user base is still fast expanding, and revenue is likely to top $1 billion this year.
Despite the fact that many companies have frozen recruitment during the cold winter, Canva's official website still has more than 250 positions open globally. Furthermore, Canva, as a company founded by female entrepreneurs, has always been eager to provide more female job seekers with opportunities. Canva currently has nearly 41 percent female employees, which is significantly higher than the industry average of 28 percent.