This week, Canva announced a £40 million founding round making its founder, Melanie Perkins, 30, perhaps the youngest female CEO to be leading a £1 billion startup.
Perkins co-founded Canva in 2014 as a way to “democratise design” for everything from slide presentations to handouts. It offers web-based design tools for people who aren’t professional graphic designers as an alternative to Powerpoint or Adobe’s design suite.
The 250 person-startup has scaled quickly claiming it has 10 million users. It has raised a total of £82 million from investors such as Sequoia China, Blackbird Ventures, and Felicis Ventures, and Canva says it is already profitable and hasn’t touched money from previous rounds (investors valued the company at $1 billion in the most recent round). It plans to spend its new cash on product development to compete with incumbents like Adobe. The company is based in Sydney, Australia, and Manilla, Philippines.
Perkins follows in the recent footsteps of Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix. On Nov. 17, 2017, Lake became last year’s first female CEO to take a company public in the US in 2017. Her e-commerce startup listed for $1.4 billion on Nasdaq. In just six years, Lake built a profitable business with nearly $1 billion in annual revenue while raising just $42 million, a fraction of the sum many startups raise to achieve the same milestone.
Perkins and Lake remain the exception. Only about 6% of senior venture capitalists are female (down from 10% since 1999) and just 2.7% of venture-backed startups have female CEOs, according to studies by Babson College and Columbia University.
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