Melanie Perkins is an Australian technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Canva, the visual communication platform used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Growing up in Perth, Western Australia, Perkins became interested in entrepreneurship early, selling handmade scarves as a teenager before studying at the University of Western Australia. While tutoring students in graphic-design software, she noticed how difficult tools such as Photoshop and InDesign were for beginners and became convinced that design should be simpler, online and collaborative. At 19, she and Cliff Obrecht began building Fusion Books, an online yearbook-design platform that became the testing ground for a much larger idea. After years of pitching, repeated investor rejection and assembling the right technical team, Perkins, Obrecht and Cameron Adams launched Canva in 2013.
Category: Builder
Field: Technology · Entrepreneurship · Design · Artificial Intelligence · Philanthropy
The Australian founder who turned a frustrating design problem into one of the world’s most widely used creative technology platforms.
EXPLORE THE BUILDER COLLECTION →
At a Glance
Canva grew from a small Australian startup into a global technology company spanning design, collaboration, productivity, professional creative software and artificial intelligence. By the end of 2025, Canva reported 260 million monthly users and $3.5 billion in annual revenue. Perkins has remained CEO throughout that expansion while preserving an unusually explicit social-impact philosophy: she and co-founder Cliff Obrecht have pledged the vast majority of their Canva equity—about 30% of the company’s value—to charitable purposes. Through Canva’s Two-Step Plan, the company now supports education and nonprofits globally and has committed $150 million toward reducing extreme poverty in Malawi.
| Born | 1987 — Perth, Western Australia |
| Country | Australia |
| Field | Technology, entrepreneurship, design, visual communication and AI |
| Known For | Co-founding and leading Canva; democratizing digital design |
| Education | University of Western Australia — studied communications, psychology and commerce; placed her studies on hold while building her companies |
| Major Roles / Organizations | Co-founder & CEO, Canva; co-founder, Fusion Books; Canva Foundation |
| First / Record / Milestone | Built Canva from a Perth startup into a global platform used by more than a quarter of a billion people each month |
| GDT Category | Builder |
Why She’s a Girls Do That Champion
Melanie Perkins did not begin with a breakthrough technology.
She began with an irritation.
She was teaching students how to use design software and kept watching intelligent people struggle with tools that were expensive, complicated and slow to learn. Rather than concluding that the students simply needed more training, she questioned the system itself:
Why did design have to be this difficult?
That is a Builder’s question.
Perkins’ story shows girls that entrepreneurship is not simply about inventing something that has never existed. Sometimes the opportunity is noticing that an existing experience is unnecessarily difficult—and believing it can be rebuilt better.
Her path also disrupts the mythology that global technology companies have to begin in Silicon Valley, with prestigious technical credentials or with immediate investor approval. Canva began in Perth. Perkins was not a software engineer. She faced years of investor rejection. She spent months trying to convince people that online, collaborative design could become a mass-market product.
Then she built it anyway.
Her story is particularly valuable because the company did not stop at making a product easier to use. Canva’s entire philosophy is based on expanding access: giving people without professional design training the ability to communicate ideas visually, giving schools and nonprofits access to professional tools, and increasingly using the economic value created by the company to fund wider social impact.
Girls Do That chose Melanie Perkins because she shows what it means to see friction, imagine a better system and keep building until millions of people can use it.
Her Story
Growing Up in Perth
Melanie Perkins was born in 1987 and grew up in Perth on Australia’s western coast.
Her mother was an Australian-born teacher, while her father was an engineer born in Malaysia with Filipino and Sri Lankan heritage. Perkins showed an entrepreneurial instinct early. As a teenager, she made scarves and sold them at markets, learning firsthand that something she created could become something another person valued enough to buy.
She was also a serious figure skater, training in the early mornings before school.
Those experiences may seem unrelated to technology, but both demanded repetition: practise, adjust, try again.
That pattern would become important later.
The Problem at University
Perkins enrolled at the University of Western Australia, studying communications, psychology, marketing and management.
While at university, she worked as a tutor teaching students how to use graphic-design software.
The experience exposed a problem.
Programs used for professional design could require months or years of learning before users felt comfortable doing relatively basic work. At the same time, internet products such as Facebook were demonstrating that sophisticated digital experiences could be designed so people understood them almost immediately.
Perkins began imagining design software that worked the same way.
Simple.
Online.
Collaborative.
Accessible to someone who was not already a professional designer.
The idea that would eventually become Canva was already forming.
But building software capable of redesigning an entire professional workflow was too ambitious for a teenage founder with little technical experience.
So she made the problem smaller.
Start Niche, Then Go Broad
Instead of beginning with every kind of graphic design, Perkins and her partner Cliff Obrecht focused on one specific market:
school yearbooks.
They founded Fusion Books in 2007.
Yearbooks were ideal.
Schools needed students, teachers and administrators to collaborate on pages. The existing process was cumbersome. And the underlying technology required many of the same things Perkins ultimately wanted from a universal design tool: templates, drag-and-drop layouts, images, text and collaborative editing.
Fusion Books became a laboratory for the bigger idea.
Perkins drew wireframes describing how she wanted the software to function and worked with an outside software company to turn them into a working product. She and Obrecht funded the company through part-time jobs, tax refunds, a small-business bank loan and Australian research-and-development support.
Their first customer found Fusion Books online in March 2008 and placed a $100 deposit.
Perkins later recalled that they debated whether to frame the cheque or cash it.
They needed the money.
They cashed it.
Building From the Living Room
The early company was not glamorous.
Fusion Books operated from Perkins’ mother’s home. Printing consumed the garage, hallway and driveway. Perkins and Obrecht were studying and working part-time while trying to build the company around everything else.
They rebuilt the software repeatedly as web technology improved.
Customers grew.
Eventually, the workload became large enough that Perkins placed her university studies on hold and both founders committed themselves fully to the business. She has since described those studies as still being on hold.
Fusion Books proved something important.
Ordinary people could create complex visual products themselves if the software was designed around them.
But Perkins had never believed yearbooks were the final market.
She wanted to build the platform underneath them.
The Bigger Idea
The larger concept was simple to explain and extremely difficult to build:
make design accessible to everyone.
Instead of requiring people to purchase expensive software, install it on a desktop and master complicated interfaces, Perkins imagined a browser-based platform where users could create professional-quality visual material quickly.
Presentations.
Posters.
Invitations.
Marketing graphics.
Documents.
Social content.
Eventually, almost anything visual.
The ambition was enormous.
The founding team was not yet.
Silicon Valley Says No
Perkins began trying to raise venture capital.
That process became one of the defining chapters of the Canva story.
In 2009, she met Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai at an event in Perth. The encounter helped expose her to venture capital and the networks required to build a global technology company.
Perkins later travelled to Silicon Valley to pitch investors.
A planned short visit expanded into months.
She attended conferences, contacted engineers, tried to build a technical founding team and pitched Canva repeatedly.
The answer was repeatedly:
No.
Canva later described Perkins and Obrecht as having faced more than 100 investor rejections during the company’s early fundraising journey.
Perkins returned to Australia from one of those early trips feeling that she had failed.
But she had also built relationships.
She kept going.
Finding the Missing Founder
Investors consistently raised one concern: Perkins and Obrecht needed deeper technical leadership.
They eventually met Cameron Adams, a highly regarded designer and engineer who had worked at Google and was building his own startup.
Perkins persisted in trying to recruit him.
Adams eventually joined Perkins and Obrecht as Canva’s third co-founder and chief product leader.
The founding team now combined:
vision + operations + product engineering.
The pieces were finally together.
Launching Canva
Canva officially launched in August 2013.
The premise was straightforward:
drag.
drop.
edit.
publish.
A user did not need to understand professional design terminology before creating something useful.
At launch, Canva brought together a browser-based design editor, templates, fonts, graphics and photography in a single environment.
This was not simply interface design.
It was a change in who the product assumed the designer could be.
The traditional model asked:
How do we build more powerful tools for professional designers?
Canva asked:
What if everyone needs the ability to design?
Designing for the Non-Designer
Canva’s growth was driven partly by what Perkins had learned while teaching.
Complexity creates exclusion.
If someone must spend months learning a tool before receiving value from it, most people will never get that far.
The company therefore paid obsessive attention to onboarding.
New users were guided toward creating something useful almost immediately. Templates reduced the terror of the blank page. Drag-and-drop interactions replaced many technical controls. Collaboration increasingly allowed teams to work inside the same visual environment.
The product converted design from a specialist activity into an everyday form of communication.
Investor and former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki later compared Canva’s effect on design to earlier technologies that had democratized computing, information and commerce.
From Startup to Unicorn
Canva grew quickly.
Six months after launch, hundreds of thousands of people were already using the platform.
By 2018, a funding round valued Canva at US$1 billion, giving the Australian company technology-industry “unicorn” status.
That milestone carried particular significance because Canva had initially struggled to convince investors that a globally significant software business could emerge from Australia.
The location that had once been presented as a disadvantage became part of the story.
Perkins had built from Perth rather than waiting for permission to belong somewhere else.
One Hundred Million
The scale kept changing.
In 2022, Canva announced that more than 100 million people were using the platform every month across more than 190 countries. By then, Canva was being used by individuals, classrooms, nonprofit organisations, startups and major multinational companies.
The original problem Perkins had observed at university had become global.
People everywhere needed to communicate visually.
Most of them were not professional designers.
Expanding the Definition of Canva
As Canva grew, the company also expanded the scope of what it considered “design.”
Presentations became documents.
Documents became websites.
Design became video.
Whiteboards.
Data.
Team collaboration.
Brand management.
Printing.
The company increasingly positioned itself not simply as a graphics application but as a visual communication platform.
In 2024, Canva acquired Affinity, a professional creative software company whose tools are used for photo editing, graphic design and publishing. Months later, it acquired Australian generative-AI company Leonardo.Ai, bringing its foundational models and research team into Canva’s growing artificial-intelligence effort.
The company that had initially built for non-designers was now expanding in both directions:
toward professional creatives,
and toward AI-assisted creation.
The AI Era
Artificial intelligence presented Canva with another version of the problem Perkins had identified nearly two decades earlier.
Powerful technology existed.
But could ordinary people actually use it?
Canva began integrating generative AI throughout its products, including writing, image generation, coding, data analysis and design automation.
In 2025, Canva introduced its Creative Operating System, combining its Visual Suite with a design-aware AI model capable of understanding layout, hierarchy and brand logic. The company reported that 260 million people were using Canva each month by the end of that year.
In 2026, Canva introduced Canva AI 2.0, describing it as its most significant product evolution since the company launched. The system allows users to begin with an idea or goal and generate layered, editable creative work conversationally rather than beginning with traditional design tools.
The technology has changed dramatically.
The mission has not.
Make complex creative technology usable by more people.
The Two-Step Plan
Canva’s growth has always been paired with another idea.
Perkins and Obrecht call it the Two-Step Plan:
Step One: Build one of the world’s most valuable companies.
Step Two: Do the most good possible.
In 2021, Perkins and Obrecht committed the vast majority of their Canva equity—approximately 30% of the company’s value—to charitable work through the Canva Foundation. Canva also participates in Pledge 1%, committing company equity, profit, product and staff time toward social impact.
The structure matters.
Philanthropy is not framed as something separate from business success.
The economic engine creates the resources for the social mission.
The larger Canva becomes, the greater the resources available for Step Two.
Malawi
One of Canva’s largest social-impact commitments is taking place in Malawi.
In 2021, Canva began working with GiveDirectly, an organisation that provides unconditional cash transfers directly to people living in extreme poverty.
The initial programme distributed US$10 million to approximately 12,800 people in rural Malawi.
The programme later expanded.
Canva reported in 2025 that it had donated US$50 million through the partnership and reached more than 139,000 people. It then announced an additional US$100 million commitment over four years, designed to reach approximately 185,000 more people and fund further research into the effects of cash transfers.
Canva now describes its total commitment toward reducing extreme poverty in Malawi as US$150 million.
The programme is one expression of Perkins’ broader belief that building a highly valuable company should eventually create value beyond its shareholders.
Still One Percent
Canva has become one of Australia’s most significant technology companies.
Yet Perkins repeatedly describes the company as only “1% of the way there.”
The phrase reveals something important about her approach to building.
The goal was never simply to launch a successful design application.
It was to change who could participate in visual communication.
Today, Canva operates across more than 190 countries and has moved from basic graphics into enterprise work, professional design and artificial intelligence.
But the original insight remains visible inside all of it:
powerful technology becomes more powerful when more people can actually use it.
Melanie Perkins saw a difficult tool.
She imagined something easier.
Then she spent years assembling the people, technology, money and systems necessary to build it.
That is what Builders do.
Milestones
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1987 | Born in Perth, Western Australia. |
| Teenage years | Starts an early business making and selling scarves at markets while also training seriously as a figure skater. |
| 2006–2007 | Studies at the University of Western Australia and tutors students using professional graphic-design software. |
| 2007 | Co-founds Fusion Books with Cliff Obrecht. |
| 2008 | Fusion Books receives its first online customer and begins expanding its yearbook-design platform. |
| 2009 | Meets Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai, beginning a network that helps connect her to the technology-investment ecosystem. |
| 2010–2012 | Spends extended periods pitching Canva, recruiting technical talent and facing repeated investor rejection. |
| 2012 | Cameron Adams joins Perkins and Obrecht as Canva’s third co-founder. |
| 2013 | Canva officially launches its online design platform. |
| 2014 | Guy Kawasaki joins Canva as chief evangelist and investor. |
| 2018 | Canva reaches a US$1 billion private valuation, becoming a technology unicorn. |
| 2019 | Canva joins Pledge 1%, committing equity, product, profit and time toward social impact. |
| 2021 | Perkins and Obrecht pledge the vast majority of their Canva equity—about 30% of the company’s value—to charitable purposes. |
| 2021 | Canva begins its direct-cash partnership with GiveDirectly in Malawi. |
| 2022 | Canva surpasses 100 million monthly users. |
| 2023 | Canva celebrates its tenth anniversary. |
| 2024 | Canva acquires professional creative-software company Affinity. |
| 2024 | Canva acquires generative-AI company Leonardo.Ai. |
| 2024 | Canva reaches approximately 220 million monthly users and 30 billion designs created. |
| 2025 | Canva reports 260 million monthly users and $3.5 billion in annual revenue. |
| 2025 | Canva commits another US$100 million to its GiveDirectly partnership, bringing its announced Malawi poverty-reduction commitment to US$150 million. |
| 2025 | Canva introduces its Creative Operating System and design-aware AI architecture. |
| 2026 | Canva introduces Canva AI 2.0 as the company enters a new conversational and agentic era of creative software. |
In Her Own Words
“I’m very bad at giving up.”
— Melanie Perkins, reflecting on the early years of building Fusion Books and Canva.
“We’re only 1% of the way there.”
— Melanie Perkins, on Canva’s ambitions beyond its first decade.
“I think the most important thing is to get started.”
— Melanie Perkins, offering advice to people with ideas they want to build.
Read · Watch · Listen
Read
Canva Uncovered: How a Young Australian Kitesurfer Built a $3.2 Billion Startup Phenom — Forbes
A detailed account of Perkins’ upbringing, Fusion Books, early fundraising and Canva’s growth.
21 Questions From Aussie Startups: Highs, Lows & Lessons Learned During Canva’s Journey — Melanie Perkins
Perkins tells the early Canva story herself, including Fusion Books, the first customer, fundraising and the long process of assembling the founding team.
21 Questions From Canva’s 10-Year Journey: Part Two — Melanie Perkins
Reflections on leadership, persistence, company culture, impact and what Perkins learned during Canva’s first decade.
Canva Revolutionized Graphic Design. Will It Survive the Age of AI? — WIRED
A contemporary interview on artificial intelligence, Canva’s evolution and Perkins’ plans for the company.
Why We Chose to Invest Another $100 Million in Cash Transfers — Melanie Perkins & Cliff Obrecht
A first-person explanation of Canva’s expanding GiveDirectly partnership and social-impact philosophy.
Watch
Canva Create 2026 Keynote
Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams present Canva’s latest product evolution and the company’s direction in AI and creative technology.
Canva CEO & Co-Founder Melanie Perkins: From Founding to the Future — New York Stock Exchange
A concise conversation with Perkins about Canva’s founding and future.
Melanie Perkins — The Girl Who Created a Unicorn — ABC
An accessible telling of the Canva founder story, particularly useful for younger audiences.
Listen
The Secret Power of Onboarding — Masters of Scale
Reid Hoffman speaks with Perkins about product simplicity, attracting investors, building teams and scaling Canva without losing its core philosophy.
Melanie Perkins, Canva CEO: From Information to Imagination — The Interview
A conversation about Canva, AI, entrepreneurship and the evolution of the internet.
An Interview With Canva CEO Melanie Perkins About Disrupting Design — Stratechery
A conversation about Canva’s founding, competitive strategy and the company’s approach to generative AI.
Go Deeper
Canva — About
https://www.canva.com/about/
Melanie Perkins — Canva Newsroom
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/author/melanie-perkins/
Canva’s Two-Step Plan
https://www.canva.com/step-two/
Canva Impact
https://www.canva.com/impact-2025/
Forbes — Melanie Perkins
https://www.forbes.com/profile/melanie-perkins/
LinkedIn — Melanie Perkins
https://au.linkedin.com/in/melanieperkins
Sources & Further Reading
APA 7th Edition
Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2018, January 9). Canva: Online design startup joins generally overvalued “unicorn” club. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-09/canva-australian-unicorn-1-billion-valuation/9312458
Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2022, March 22). Melanie Perkins — The girl who created a unicorn. Fierce Girls. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/fierce-girls/melanie-perkins-the-girl-who-created-a-unicorn/13799786
Canva. (n.d.). About Canva. https://www.canva.com/about/
Canva. (n.d.). Our Two-Step Plan. https://www.canva.com/step-two/
Canva. (2013, August 26). Canva makes graphic design amazingly simple for everyone. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-makes-graphic-design-amazingly-simple-everyone/
Canva. (2018). Canva raises $40M round to earn unicorn title. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-raises-40m-round-earn-unicorn-title/
Canva. (2024, March 26). Welcome to Canva, Affinity! https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/
Canva. (2024). Welcome to Canva, Leonardo! https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/leonardo-ai/
Canva. (2024). Looking back on 2024: A game-changing year for Canva. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-2024-wrap/
Canva. (2025). A transformative year for Canva: 2025 in review. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-2025-wrap/
Canva. (2025). Inside Canva’s first Impact Wrap. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/2025-impact-wrap/
Canva. (2026). Introducing Canva AI 2.0: Reimagining how the world creates. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-create-2026-ai/
Canva. (2026). The next era of Canva. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-next-era/
Forbes. (2026). Melanie Perkins. https://www.forbes.com/profile/melanie-perkins/
Konrad, A. (2019, December 11). Canva uncovered: How a young Australian kitesurfer built a $3.2 billion (profitable!) startup phenom. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/12/11/inside-canva-profitable-3-billion-startup-phenom/
Masters of Scale. (2020, December 8). The secret power of onboarding: Canva’s Melanie Perkins. https://mastersofscale.com/melanie-perkins/
Perkins, M. (n.d.). 21 questions from Aussie startups: Highs, lows & lessons learned during Canva’s journey so far (Part 1). Canva. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/melanie-perkins-21-questions-part-1/
Perkins, M. (n.d.). 21 questions from Canva’s 10-year journey: Part two. Canva. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/melanie-perkins-21-questions-part-2/
Perkins, M., & Obrecht, C. (2025). Why we chose to invest another $100 million in cash transfers. Canva. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/give-directly-update-2025/
Stanford University School of Engineering. (n.d.). Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins. https://engineering.stanford.edu/
Thompson, B. (2024, August 22). An interview with Canva CEO Melanie Perkins about disrupting design. Stratechery. https://stratechery.com/2024/an-interview-with-canva-ceo-melanie-perkins-about-disrupting-design/
WIRED. (2024). Canva revolutionized graphic design. Will it survive the age of AI? https://www.wired.com/story/canva-ceo-melanie-perkins-interview/
Final Collection CTA
Build the thing you wish existed.
Explore the Girls Do That Builder Collection—books, apparel, stationery and other products celebrating women and girls who turn ideas into products, companies, technologies and systems the world can use.
Every collection helps fund a Girls Do That Club for the next generation.
