Canva | Melanie Perkins: It took Melanie Perkins 100+ rejections over 3 yrs (& some faith!) to give life to design platform Canva (2024)

FAQs

How many times did Canva get rejected? ›

After that, she turned a high school year book idea into Canva; during her pitching time for Canva, she was rejected over 100 times by local investors in Perth.

Melanie Perkins (born 1987) is an Australian technology entrepreneur, who is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Canva (with Cliff Obrecht). She owns 18% of the company.

Starting a company like Canva was not easy, and Melanie faced many obstacles along the way. One of the biggest hurdles was getting investors to believe in her vision. In the early days of Canva, Melanie and her team pitched their idea to more than 100 investors, and they were rejected by all of them.

Perkins came up with the idea for Canva in 2007 when she was just 19. She was teaching design programmes to her peers in university when she realised that most of the programmes were expensive, complex, and inaccessible. She conceptualised a future of design which would be simple, virtual, and collaborative.

However, they also acknowledged that despite its user-friendliness and comprehensive features, Canva has certain disadvantages that may come from the application and the students themselves. Factors like overreliance on the application and weak connectivity may pose a challenge to their design process.

User reports indicate no current problems at Canva.

Canva is valued at $40 billion in 2024. Canva is reported to have generated $2 billion in annual revenue. Canva has raised a total funding of $589 million over 18 rounds. There are 3500 employees in Canva as of 2024.

Canva has raised a total of $560 million in venture capital, including $200 million at a peak valuation of $40 billion in 2021. Expectations are that Canva, funded by Australia's Blackbird Ventures and AirTree Ventures, Goldman Sachs, T.

Canva's Community Currently Has 130 Million Active Users

And, Canva reached a substantial milestone of 100 million users in October 2022. It's also said that 67% of those people use paid subscriptions instead of free accounts, which gives them access to an array of premium templates and design elements.

Canva is good for beginners

However, it will not replace the years of education and experience needed to be a well-rounded and successful designer.

Why don t designers use Canva? ›

You Don't Have Collaboration Features

This can make it difficult for designers to work with clients and team members and get feedback on their work. Despite these limitations, many non-designers continue to use Canva for their graphic design needs.

Canva addresses the problem of difficult designing, by providing an easy to use customer interface for people. “It was not just the tools themselves that were preventing people from creating great designs, but also people's own belief that they can't design.

To allow anyone to make beautiful designs. Perkins was at the University of Western Australia at the time, teaching design programs to students who were struggling to learn the basics. So she wanted to make designing something really simple and easy to conquer.

Perkins has often said that 100 Silicon Valley investors rejected her before she finally got a bite.

Justification. Canva's growth trajectory significantly outpaces that of Atlassian, making it a standout candidate for a higher valuation multiple. If it were publicly traded, Canva would rank among the fastest-growing software companies.

It can take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks for Canva to approve your nonprofit organization. The best thing you can do is submit your application as soon as possible.

If you're part of a team, your team's owner may have decided to delete it. When this happens, the team and all designs created in it are scheduled for permanent deletion in 14 days. Contact your team owner to confirm if this is the case. If it's still within 14 days, the team owner can undo deletion.

Canva free users can upload up to 5GB of media. Canva for Education and Canva for Nonprofits users can upload up to 100GB. Canva Pro and Canva Teams users have 1TB storage.