Photo credit: Canva.
Raising capital, a perennial challenge for most growing companies, is one problem Australian graphic design startup Canva doesn’t have right now. The company just announced it has raised a new round of funding worth US$15 million.
Canva thinks of its product as a collaboration tool for the modern, connected workplace.
The cash comes from existing investors Blackbird Ventures and Felicis Ventures, from Australia and Silicon Valley respectively. This round values the company at US$345 million, up from its US$165 million at the time of its series A in October 2015.
The startup says it hasn’t spent any of the funds from that round, where it raised US$15 million.
Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins tells Tech in Asia the company was very happy working with its investors and the people and networks they were able to connect them to – which is why it was happy to raise more capital from them.
In particular, Felicis managing director Wesley Chan (former partner at Google Ventures and best known as the creator of Google Analytics) shared a lot of his valuable experience with the startup, Melanie says.
“It’s always good to have more capital than you urgently need, so it’s been very helpful to gear up Canva up for a lot of future success,” she adds.
Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins. Photo credit: Canva.
Aiming for the workplace
Canva has created a software suite of tools that enables users to produce their own graphic designs for social media, presentations, and so on. It offers a free consumer version and a paid service called Canva for Work.
The startup thinks of its product as being close to the likes of Slack, Dropbox, and Trello – a collaboration tool for the modern, connected workplace. “It’s pretty much taking everything that’s been in Microsoft Office and giving it a really strong visual slant,” Melanie explains.
So instead of the designers in an organization creating works that need to go through a lot of back and forth with feedback and changes, the team can create templates that other departments, like sales and marketing, can then edit as needed.
“There’s a lot to do to make Canva the place that powers the modern workforce, that everyone turns to to create designs and content that they previously couldn’t,” Melanie says. “Visual literacy is going to become very important across every profession in the future.”
Melanie doesn’t go into specifics regarding new additions to the product, but says the vision is to make it accessible to as many people as possible, across different systems and markets.
The Canva app was recently released on iPhone.
Global market
Right now Canva is available on desktop, iPad, and iPhone, with an Android version in the works. It comes in 11 languages and the company plans to add another nine by the end of the year.
The Canva for Work product is used by more than 50,000 teams, Melanie says. She declines to reveal how many users the consumer version has or the company’s revenue growth in the last 12 months, although she describes it as “rapid.”
Visual literacy is going to become very important across every profession in the future.
The company has raised US$42 million in external capital to date from investors like Matrix Partners, 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, and American actors Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson.
It has a staff of more than 120 people across three offices in Sydney, San Francisco, and Manila. It’s going to keep adding more people in order to expand and grow its business. “We’re growing very rapidly across marketing, engineering, and product,” Melanie says.
However, it won’t open more offices at the moment. “We’re not having much difficulty accessing the global market as it currently stands,” she adds.
Canva is available in several markets all over the world, with most users coming from the US, Australia, the UK, India, and Canada.
See more on Canva
- Graphic design startup Canva goes global with support for six new languages
- Canva brings graphic design app to businesses, raises another $6M
- I’m Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist at Canva. AMA!
This post Canva just raised $15m without even touching the funds from its last round appeared first on Tech in Asia.
from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/canva-15m-funding
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