Australian online design start up Canva has raised $200 million, valuing the business at $40 billion, making it one of the most valuable private start ups in the world.
It follows on successful fund raising for Printify, Gelato and the acquisition of the Spoonflower textile design business by Shutterfly, amounting a new dotcom boom for design and print.
Canva already has strong links to print, with online print groups like Tradeprint and Helloprint in official partnership with the Australian company and others, Precision Proco included, able to print designs created with the software.
Canva, however, is not about creating designs for print. Rather, the target is design for social media, for online presentations, shortly for websites, as well as for print. There are some 60 million individuals using the browser based software each month, logging in to modify thousands of templates for business cards, CVs, menus, presentation graphics and more.
There are print specific templates for business cards, invitations, wall art, T-shirts, mugs, photobooks, stickers and labels, posters, postcards, flyers and trifold brochures. More will be added. There are more than 250,000 templates and access to hundreds of thousands of stock photos.
The money raised will be used to double the headcount, currently 2,000 strong and to continue expansion. The company says it is responsible for more than 5 billion designs since launch in 2013. It will hit a $1 billion a year in sales by the end of this year.
A key advantage that Canva has is being cloud based, being operated through a browser. This means designs can be shared and edited across a wide area network. This presented an opportunity during lockdown and the target market of non skilled people wanting or needing to design something without the challenge and cost of using Adobe products, have swollen the user base.
The simplicity, speed and cost (for enterprise users) has led to penetration into professional design and web design agencies, creating content that ends up on paper as well as on digital channels.
