Before Canva became a $42 billion platform, Canva founder Melanie Perkins repeatedly heard investors say no – until she proved the product was worth it.
It wasn’t long before Canva became the kind of product people used without thinking about it. A pitch deck finished at midnight. A flyer for a school fundraiser. A last-minute slide where the logo refuses to align.
The software slipped into everyday work, with its interface feeling less like traditional design software and more like a way around the intimidation that usually came with it.
That simplicity, however, also made the idea easy to underestimate. In those early days, when investors heard “design tool,” they pictured a niche product for professionals.
Canva founder Melanie Perkins, the Australian entrepreneur behind the design platform, was determined to prove she wasn’t trying to build just another tool. She was trying to build a future where making something visual could feel as routine as writing an email.
The moment the problem became visible
The problem wasn’t that people lacked ideas, it was that the tools demanded fluency before they allowed expression.
To an investor looking at creative software in that era, however, the problem could easily look small. Professionals already had tools. Incumbents appeared entrenched. And “everyone else” sounded vague – too broad to price, too messy to model.
From the start, Perkins understood that arguing the point wouldn’t change anyone’s mind. So, she decided that the only way forward was to build something that made the case for her.
Fusion Books became the first real test of Melanie Perkins’ idea
In 2007, she and Cliff Obrecht launched Fusion Books, a drag-and-drop platform for designing school yearbooks. It wasn’t a grand statement about the future of design software, but it was the practical test they needed.
Schools had fixed deadlines, students had little patience, and no one cared about software ideology, yet they still needed to get the yearbook finished.
It also began to answer one of the quiet assumptions behind many early doubts, questioning whether most every day people wanted to design in the first place.
Fusion Books suggested they would. Students who had never opened professional design software started arranging photos, dragging text boxes into place, and experimenting with layouts, while teachers who had no interest in learning complicated tools were suddenly finishing yearbook pages themselves.
How Melanie Perkins stood in front of the rooms that said no
When Perkins tried to widen the thesis – from yearbooks to everyday design – investors had reverted to the belief that it was “too broad,” “too early” or “too mission-driven”.
“Design for everyone,” to them, sounded like an aspiration, not a category. It didn’t map neatly to the way software markets were supposed to behave, where a product won by going deeper with experts, not wider with beginners.
Perkins later said she was rejected more than 100 times. The number is striking, but what it really captures is the atmosphere around the idea in those early years. Despite the rejections, she kept walking into rooms where the ambition felt slightly out of place.
Eventually, all those “no’s” started to play in her favor. Every rejection forced Perkins to sharpen her story, explaining her belief more and more clearly each and every day.
As Perkins’ ambition grew, Cameron Adams, a former Google designer, joined Perkins and Obrecht as a co-founder. Together, they began building a broader platform based on the same principle of easy design that had made Fusion Books work.
In early 2013, the company raised its first funding round, a $3 million seed investment that gave the small team the resources to bring the idea to life.
Later that year, the platform launched as Canva, turning what had once been an argument in investor meetings into a product people could open in a browser and try for themselves.
Canva’s early traction quickly changed the tone of the conversation. Within its first year, the platform had attracted hundreds of thousands of users, while the question of whether people would actually design started to look more like a misunderstanding.
The demand had always been there
By September 2021, Canva had raised $200 million at a $40 billion valuation, briefly making it one of the world’s most valuable private software companies. But even still, the skepticism decided to take on a new form.
If Canva began as a beginner-friendly tool, skeptics could still ask whether it would remain “lightweight,” whether professionals would ever take it seriously, and whether it could defend itself as AI changed how images were made.
Canva’s answer was to expand without losing the original promise. In 2024, it acquired Affinity, moving deeper into professional creative workflows.
Later came acquisitions like Leonardo.ai, integrating generative visual AI into the platform and expanding Canva’s role in how teams will continue to create visual content for generations to come.
So, when you look at the headlines, Canva’s story collapses into milestones. Hundreds of millions of users. A $200 million funding round. A $40 billion valuation. Then $42 billion. You know, the kind of numbers that make a company’s rise read like a straight line.
But the reality was years of rooms where the answer was no, of an idea that sounded too broad until the product made it obvious. Perkins didn’t win those arguments in a single moment – she just refused to give up.
