Melanie Perkins, who co-founded Canva with her fiance, Cliff Obrecht back in 2014 doubled her wealth in the last few months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By October 2019 and up to March 2020, her fortune amounted to $1.3 billion as Canva expanded to Manila and Beijing. As people working from home utilized her graphic design software, Canva became more popular and made her fortune increase up to $2.5 billion. That catapulted Melanie to become Australia’s third richest woman, behind Gina Rinehart, owner of Hancock Prospecting and Vicky Teoh, founder of
TPG Telcom.
As of now, the current value of Canva stands at $8.77 billion after its latest investor round from shareholders including Blackbird Ventures and Sequoia Capital. The Canva co-founder once shared that she thought of the business from her mother’s couch as a university student while taking a first year digital media subject. Her skills and passion in graphic design back then was enough to get her invited to conduct graphic design workshops for other students. From there, she discovered that a lot of people faced struggles in using the existing graphic design software and so she decided to develop a more user-friendly one instead.
She started her business with the idea of making a user-friendly graphic design software that allowed schools and student to develop their own yearbook in 2007. Surprisingly, her inexperience in business and marketing made her more confident that starting a company wouldn't be too difficult. With her fiance, then-boyfriend, they started their company with a bank loan, online advertisements and giving away yearbook samples to schools. It was in 2008 that they made their first sale to a French school in Sydney. Melanie mentioned that the money from the first sale was invested back into the business. From 2008 to 2010, the couple sold to 15 schools, 30 schools and 80 schools respectively.
It was after meeting their first investor at the 2010 Innovator of the Year Awards in Perth that the couple decided to expand their business and pitch the idea for a free online tool that helps people for web graphic designs. Melanie then met up with as many investors and software engineers as she could. By 2013, Canva was officially launched after its first funding round with $3 million. By 2014, Canva amassed a million users. Since then, the company raised hundreds of million dollars
from their investors and its value goes up with every investor round.
Kudos to Melanie Perkins for her achievements! She made something amazing from something that she loved as a contribution to the community. Let’s all strive to become useful to society through something we’re passionate about.
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