From a Spare Bedroom to a $40 Billion Empire: The Melanie Perkins Story
How a 19-year-old with a stubborn vision and a mountain of rejection built one of the world’s most valuable startups
A Dream Born Out of Frustration
The year was 2007. Melanie Perkins was a 19-year-old university student in Perth, Australia, teaching fellow students how to use design software like Adobe InDesign and Photoshop. What struck her wasn’t just how difficult the programs were to learn — it was how fundamentally broken the entire design process felt. Students would spend an entire semester learning the basics of software that professionals themselves struggled to master, only to produce work they couldn’t easily share or collaborate on.
Most people would have shrugged and moved on. Perkins saw a billion-dollar opportunity hiding inside that frustration.
“I thought, one day everything is going to be online and collaborative,” she later recalled. That thought — simple, almost obvious in hindsight — became the seed of Canva, the design platform now used by over 170 million people worldwide.
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The First Bet: Fusion Books
Before Canva, there was Fusion Books. Perkins didn’t leap straight into building a global design empire. She started small and scrappy, the way great entrepreneurs often do.
Together with her then-boyfriend (now co-founder and husband) Cliff Obrecht, Perkins launched Fusion Books out of her mother’s living room in 2007. The idea was straightforward: give high school students an easy, online tool to design their yearbooks. Schools were frustrated with clunky, expensive processes managed by third parties. Fusion Books put the design power directly in students’ hands.
It worked. Fusion Books grew steadily and eventually became Australia’s largest yearbook company. But for Perkins, it was never the destination — it was proof of concept. If non-designers could create beautiful yearbooks through a simplified online tool, what could they do with a platform that covered all their design needs?
The real vision was always bigger.
A Wall of Rejection
Armed with the success of Fusion Books and a fully formed vision for Canva, Perkins flew to San Francisco in 2011 to pitch to investors. What followed was a masterclass in perseverance.
She pitched to over 100 venture capitalists. Over 100 of them said no.
The rejections weren’t always polite. Some investors dismissed the idea outright. Others couldn’t see past the geography — a startup from Perth, Australia, halfway across the world from Silicon Valley, didn’t fit neatly into anyone’s portfolio thesis. Some questioned whether a design tool for non-designers could ever be a real business when professionals already had Photoshop and Illustrator.
Perkins kept going. She networked relentlessly, attending kite-surfing lessons in San Francisco specifically because she’d heard that Bill Tai, a prominent venture capitalist and kite-surfing enthusiast, organized events around the sport. It paid off — Tai became a supporter, helping connect Perkins with the right circles and eventually facilitating an introduction to Lars Rasmussen, co-founder of Google Maps, who became an advisor.
The breakthrough investor came in the form of Matrix Partners’ Cameron Adams. But the pivotal moment arrived when Perkins managed to get a meeting with Guy Kawasaki, the legendary marketing evangelist and former Apple chief evangelist. He not only invested but joined as Canva’s Chief Evangelist — a stamp of legitimacy that helped open other doors.
In 2013, after years of building, pitching, and refusing to quit, Canva officially launched.
Building Something Different
From the start, Canva was built around a radical premise: design shouldn’t require talent or training. Anyone — a small business owner, a teacher, a nonprofit coordinator, a social media manager — should be able to create something beautiful in minutes.
The product delivered on that promise with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, thousands of professionally designed templates, and a library of elements, fonts, photos, and illustrations. Users didn’t need to start from scratch. They could pick a template for a resume, a presentation, a poster, or a social media graphic, swap in their own content, and be done in minutes.
The freemium model was equally clever. The core product was free, making adoption frictionless. Premium features and assets were available through a paid subscription, creating a business model that scaled naturally as users grew more dependent on the tool.
Canva grew fast. Then it grew faster.
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Explosive Growth and a Pandemic Tailwind
By 2019, Canva was already a unicorn — valued at over $1 billion — but the company’s growth trajectory took on a new dimension in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated remote work, digital communication, and the democratization of online content creation. Suddenly, millions more people needed to design things: teachers creating virtual lesson slides, small businesses pivoting their marketing online, nonprofits communicating with distributed teams.
Canva’s user base surged. The platform went from around 20 million users pre-pandemic to over 60 million by late 2020, eventually reaching 170 million monthly users by the mid-2020s. Revenue grew proportionally, with the company reportedly generating over $2 billion annually.
The valuation peaked at $40 billion in 2021, making Canva one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world — and Melanie Perkins one of the wealthiest self-made women on the planet.
More Than a Product Company
What sets Perkins apart from many tech founders is how deliberately she has built Canva as a mission-driven company. She and Obrecht have pledged the majority of their equity to philanthropic causes through the Canva Foundation, inspired in part by the Giving Pledge movement.
Canva has also worked to make design accessible in a deeper sense — offering Canva for Education free to teachers and students globally, and Canva for Nonprofits at no cost to registered charitable organizations. These programs aren’t just good PR; they reflect a genuine belief that the power to communicate visually should not be gatekept by cost or complexity.
The company’s culture has reflected this ethos. Perkins has spoken frequently about building a workplace that is values-led, one where employees are motivated by the mission and not just the paycheck.
The Road Ahead
Canva has continued to evolve well beyond its roots as a template-based design tool. The company has expanded aggressively into presentations, video editing, document creation, and AI-powered design features. Its acquisition strategy has brought in tools like Pexels, Pixabay, and Flourish (a data visualization platform), steadily expanding what “design” means within the Canva ecosystem.
The long-term vision Perkins has articulated is even grander: to become the operating system for visual communication in the way that Microsoft Office became the operating system for office productivity. In a world where every brand, creator, educator, and organization needs to communicate visually — across social media, email, video, print, and beyond — that is not a small ambition.
What Melanie Perkins Teaches Us
There is no shortage of startup success stories, but Melanie Perkins’ journey stands out for a few reasons. She started with a real problem she’d experienced herself. She validated the idea at a small scale before swinging for the global market. She absorbed over a hundred rejections without abandoning the core vision. And she built a company where financial success and social purpose are treated as complements rather than contradictions.
The story of Canva is, at its heart, the story of a young woman from Perth who decided that the way the world approached design was broken — and then spent the better part of a decade proving everyone who disagreed with her wrong.
That stubbornness, it turns out, was her greatest design.
Melanie Perkins serves as CEO and co-founder of Canva. The company is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, and operates globally across more than 190 countries.
