The Australian graphic design and collaboration platform, Canva announced on Tuesday that it is now valued at $40 billion after the company raised $200 million in a funding round managed by investment management firm T.Rowe Price.
The $200 Million Funding will be Used to Expand Canva’s Team
Canva enables users to create posters, social media graphics, displays, and more by providing presets and templates, and the company was valued at $15 billion in a funding round in April. The $200 million investment will be utilized to grow Canva’s team of more than 2,000 employees, which the firm expects to multiply in the year ahead, it stated.
Furthermore, T.Rowe Price, which has $1.68 trillion in assets under administration, was followed by Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, and Bessemer Venture Partners among others in the latest $200 million funding round. Canva was established in the year 2013 and currently has more than 60 million monthly active users across 190 nations and for customers the graphic design platform has Zoom Video Communications, Salesforce, and PayPal.
The Australian Graphic Design Platform Wants to Replace PDFs
“We would like to replace PDF,” said Perkins. “Rather than people sending PDFs backwards and forwards between the designer and the client, designers can just create a template for organization use. It’s less important for us to absolutely excel at things like vector design because there are amazing programs on the market that may be there. We really want to focus on that collaboration piece.”
Read more: Canva leaps to a $15 billion valuation, making co-founders billionaires
Canva is Obsessed with Producing a Highly Valuable Free Product
Canva operates on a bottoms-up enterprise strategy that is relatively successful these days, the company was an early master of the model. Initially, Canva rolled out a free product, and over time the company launched enterprise layers into the mix. According to the co-founder and CEO, Melanie Perkins, a huge part of the graphic design platform’s growth has to do with a fixation with producing a highly valuable free product.
“We intentionally make our free product extremely generous for a number of reasons,” said Perkins. “It’s critical both for our marketing and towards our mission of empowering people to design. But, as part of our marketing, it means that people are able to love the product, share it with their friends and family, and promote it on social media. And then that virality really rapidly fuels our growth.”
The Graphic Design Platform Soon to Offer Website Designing
Alongside growing the team with the raised $200 million funding, Canva also has plans to further develop the product of website design and roll out by the next year. This will enable users to convert existing and new presentations and designs into a website, and even search for and purchase a domain for that site.
Source: TechCrunch
