Thanks to a new funding round led by T. Rowe Price, online design platform Canva is now valued at $40bn. The company raised $200m in the round, as the company continues its rapid growth.
Canva now has more than 60m active users across 190 countries, and has more than 2,000 employees. It has more than doubled revenues year on year, and is on track from revenues of $1bn or more.
According to Canva co-founder and Chief Executive Melanie Perkins:
“Visual communication has emerged as a universal need for teams of every size across almost every industry. More than 60 million people are now using Canva for everything from launching startups to raising awareness for nonprofits, supporting remote learning, collaborating in distributed teams and managing global enterprise brands at scale.”
The accessibility for non-creatives, as well as a tool in which the free to use features is a major reason for its success. The quality of the free version encourages people to use it, and the effectiveness of the tool encourages people to pay for the extras. It's a lesson other software tools can learn from. It has more than 500,000 paying customers, so this approach appears to have been successful.
It has also constantly improved. According to MA contributor Adam Clarke, 'Canva has continued to add to its product offering and you can literally do anything that you might want to do to a good standard. Perhaps the key is that they listened to what customers wanted.'
The accessibility for non-creatives to create good looking images for social media was a game changer for me and has been in my recommended app stack for that ever since. Helping non-creatives to uplift their content and providing the ability to make content themselves without having to wait for a designer is incredibly empowering for marketers and non-marketers alike., though it is still very easy to make terrible things on Canva - I’ve seen and made more than my fair share.
As well as entrepreneurs and small marketing teams, Canva has been embraced by larger businesses across the world - it has been used by Zoom, Salesforce, Paypal, Marriott International and American Airlines. These larger firms see the benefits of putting more power into the hands of non-creatives and other key people within organisations who perhaps don’t have time to wait.
As Adam Clarke continues:
"The world has changed a lot since Canva launched in 2013 and Canva has changed with it. Perhaps it has even been a huge influence on that change without many people even realising. Quietly powering people’s ideas and supporting creativity across the global. It’s probably impossible to measure the impact it has had on people’s ability to startup a new brand on a shoestring with half decent graphics, especially during the pandemic. The days of people misusing PowerPoint in a panic are long since gone (Thank God).