6. Canva

Founders: Melanie Perkins (CEO), Cliff Obrecht, Cameron Adams
Launched: 2012
Headquarters: Sydney, Australia
Funding: $560 million
Valuation: $26 billion
Key technologies: N/A
Industry: Enterprise technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 List: 2 (No. 3 in 2023)

Australian graphic design startup Canva, known for its easy-to-use software tools, continues to scale up, going after business accounts, integrating AI, competing more aggressively with Adobe, and completing a transaction for its original investors to cash out.

An IPO could be the next milestone for Canva, which has logged seven years of profitability and approximately $2 billion in annual revenue globally with 170 million users, a one-year leap from 110 million.  

Expanding from its original base of individual consumers, last year Canva nearly doubled its number of enterprise team users to 135,000, relying on Salesforce to help penetrate this significant market of larger customers. Currently, 90% of the Fortune 500 are using Canva design tools, and companies including Reddit and Zoom became clients over the past two years.

Competing with Adobe and fellow Disruptor Figma, and filling in its product lineup, the Sydney-based company recently acquired Serif, a U.K-based seller of software geared toward professional designers with three million-plus users.  

Canva opened a London office last year, now has eight campuses globally, and has accelerated its AI deployment. In 2023, it launched MagicStudio, 10 AI-powered tools and several apps that can generate images and videos from a single prompt text. Its AI-powered products were used more than 4 billion times last year.

With prominent concerns over the safe use of generative AI, Canva last year introduced Shield, a collection of enterprise-grade safety, trust and privacy tools, including indemnification in case of an intellectual property claim resulting from content designed on this platform. Also in the IP sphere, Canva established a $200 million fund to pay creators for use of their content to train its AI.

In another realm, Canva for Campus was launched as a paid subscription for colleges and universities, including the University of California's 500,000 students and faculty. Canva is reaching 50 million classroom users on campuses and through its K-12 free and premium features, offered since 2019.  

Venture-backed startup IPOs are still proving to be challenging, but in April, Canva completed a $1.5 billion sale of shares held primarily by early employees and backers at a valuation of $26 billion, six months after a small secondary sale at a similar valuation. These secondary transactions let investors cash out instead of waiting for an IPO. 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. Rowe Price and several leading Silicon Valley firms, will go public in 2025 or 2026.