जगत उद्यम The Startup Atlas › ओशिआनिया Oceania
Canva
Perth and Sydney, Australia · Founded 2013 · Software · Design · Founders: Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, Cameron Adams
The one lesson
Sell to the people the professional tool ignored, and make the first design free.
Design software was built for designers. Canva built it for everyone else, gave it away to start and turned that crowd into 31 million paying users.
- 265 M+ Monthly users — End of 2025.
- 31 M Paying users — End of 2025.
- $4 bn Annual recurring revenue — End of 2025. TechCrunch.
- 100+ Investors who said no — In 2012, before the first round.
The story
In 2007 Melanie Perkins, then a student at the University of Western Australia, and Cliff Obrecht started Fusion Books, an online tool that let schools design their own yearbooks with drag-and-drop templates. It worked. It also showed them that most people who needed to design something were not designers.
In 2012 they went to San Francisco to raise money for a design platform for everyone. More than 100 investors said no. They kept going, brought in the former Google designer Cameron Adams as a third co-founder, raised from Blackbird Ventures and an Australian government matching grant, and launched Canva in 2013.
Canva was free to start and paid for more. Teachers, small businesses, students and marketers who had never opened professional design software made their first poster in minutes and shared it, and the design itself carried the brand to the next user.
Canva became profitable in 2017. By the end of 2025 it had more than 265 million monthly users, 31 million paying ones and $4 billion in annual recurring revenue.
Why it worked
- The incumbents measured their market in designers. Canva measured it in everyone who needs a slide or a poster.
- Free to start removed the risk of trying. Templates removed the skill.
- Every shared design was an advertisement made by a customer.
What a founder in India can take
Look for the customers your category’s leaders consider too small or too unskilled to serve. Build for them, let them start free and make what they produce carry your name. In India the biggest markets are usually the ones the incumbents decided were not worth the trouble.