Canva Hits $3.2 Billion Valuation After $85 Million Raise For Big-Business Push

Canva has reached an eye-popping new valuation as it makes its first push into larger customers for its design software suite.

Sydney-based Canva announced on Wednesday that it raised $85 million in new funding from existing investors including Bond, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Blackbird and Sequoia China. After the funding round, Canva’s valuation has increased to $3.2 billion, up from its $2.5 billion valuation announced in May.

In an interview, cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins said Canva’s new funding is intended to help Canva hire and invest in research and development for its first push into the enterprise. Canva claims to have 20 million monthly customers who produce 36 designs every second, but historically most of Canva’s user base have operated individually or in small teams. Canva’s mission now is to encourage those users at corporations—Canva says it has users within a majority of America’s largest companies by revenue—to spread Canva within their organizations so its software is used at scale.

The funding is mostly an “inside round,” meaning that many of the investors come from Canva’s previous investor base, with new investor Bessemer joining. That can typically raise questions in the startup community, as firms could potentially inflate their own portfolio’s valuations or use such rounds to provide a cash infusion to businesses that struggle. Perkins says that Canva’s new funding is the opposite: Canva acquiescing to take more money after a period of holding investors back, but changing its mind for the enterprise push. “We have been really conscientious about not taking on too much capital because we’ve been profitable for the last two years,” Perkins says. “We really want to be used by every single enterprise across the globe.”

Operating from its Australia base, Canva maintains offices in Manila and Beijing as well, but is likely to hire considerably in the United States in upcoming months, Perkins says. The company currently employs 700 people and expects to double that in the next year. The U.S. already represents one of Canva’s most important markets, representing millions of monthly users.

Canva became popular for its easy-to-use software that provides templates for users to build flyers, social media cards and other design-heavy elements without any design expertise. Customers range from real estate businesses to schools, entrepreneurs to McDonald’s China. For its enterprise product, Perkins says Canva’s focus has been a counterintuitive one: offer fewer features, not more. “A lot of enterprises really struggle being able to have their entire business be on-brand, and they struggle when they have lots of locations around the globe and different departments trying to get a lot of content created,” she says. Canva’s solution is to put guardrails in place, providing a stripped-down version of its templates and design elements as approved by administrators employees at businesses can make designs preapproved by corporate. At a real estate business, for example, agents could use the tool to design their own open-house marketing materials without requiring designer support.

Canva was one of the biggest movers on the Forbes Cloud 100 list in 2019, appearing at No. 16. It previously raised $70 million in May, valuing the business at $2.5 billion after the first announced investment for Bond, the firm cofounded by famed internet investor Mary Meeker.