Melanie Perkins design software company, Canva now valued at around $40 billion is an ideal story that shows significant growth despite the challenges of starting small.
Canva is a $40 billion software that enables users to create attractive visuals for menus, resumes, and graphics, with over 60 million monthly users and 500,000 teams in less than 10 years of its launch. Melanie Perkins alongside her now-husband Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams launched Canva in 2013.
Melanin Perkins is an entrepreneur born in Australia in 1987 and a co-founder of one of the most successful startups in the world. She schooled at Sacred Heart College in Australia.
In the year 2007, she dropped out to start her own business Fusion books with her friend Obretch, helping students design their own yearbooks. Her parents helped her to print and coordinate the yearbooks as her mother was a school teacher.
In the early stages of the business, she and her friend tried to get new clients for the business by cold calling schools and trying to get them to join the company’s client base. While running Fusion books, she came up with the idea of Canva, a design website that would make it easier for students to make designs on their own, she predicted that in the future, graphic design platforms would be very easy to use.
While still in their small town of Perth, Melanie and Obretch pitched Canva to over 100 local investors but were rejected by all of them. While pitching Canva, they grew Fusion books to the largest yearbook company in Australia and expanded to France and New Zealand.
In 2011 Melanie met Cameron Adams a former google employee with expertise in tech and offered him a position as co-founder of Canva and he accepted. In 2013 Canva was officially launched and by 2016 Canva was valued at $165 million. In the same year, Melanie was featured in Forbes under 30 Class year.
Melanie Perkins is also a philanthropist as she expressed her desire to donate most of her fortune to charity. Her current net worth is $6.5 billion as her company Canva is being used by about 60 million people across 190 countries.
