Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins learned to kitesurf because the investor she needed ran his network from the water. She had already logged more than a hundred rejections in a notebook and spent roughly three months sleeping on her brother's apartment floor in San Francisco to be in the room when introductions happened.¹

Perkins is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Canva, an online graphic design platform that replaced professional tools like Photoshop and InDesign with free, drag-and-drop templates, letting people with no design training create presentations, social posts, documents, and print materials. Founded in Perth, Western Australia, and later headquartered in Sydney, Canva grew from a yearbook editor into one of the most valuable privately held technology companies, with roughly 220 million monthly users by the mid-2020s.²

Background

Perkins was born in 1987 in Perth to an Australian-born teacher and a Malaysian-born engineer of Filipino and Sri Lankan heritage. She started her first business at 14 selling handmade scarves at local markets, and trained in competitive figure skating, rising at 4:30am through her school years at Sacred Heart College in Sorrento.³ She went on to the University of Western Australia to study communications, psychology, and commerce, met Cliff Obrecht there, her future co-founder, COO, and husband, and left around 19 without finishing the degree to pursue the business full time.

Getting started

The founding insight came from tutoring classmates in Photoshop and InDesign: capable students lost entire semesters just learning the software, which convinced Perkins design should be, in her words, online, collaborative, and much simpler. In 2007, at 19, she co-founded Fusion Books with Obrecht from her mother's living room, a drag-and-drop online yearbook editor for Australian high schools, funded by a $50,000 friends-and-family loan. Fusion Books scaled to more than 400 schools and over $1 million in revenue. Perkins treated it not as an endgame but as a deliberate first step, proof the team could execute ahead of the larger design-platform vision that became Canva.³

Raising money proved difficult. Perkins faced more than 100 investor rejections, compounded by being based in Perth, which had no local venture ecosystem, by her age, and by having a co-founder who was also her boyfriend; she tracked each rejection in a notebook to revise the pitch. The break came in 2011, when she spotted Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai, an early backer of Zoom and TweetDeck, at a Perth awards event. She pursued the relationship, spent roughly three months sleeping on her brother's San Francisco apartment floor while attending events nightly, and learned to kitesurf to stay inside Tai's MaiTai network. Tai introduced her to Lars Rasmussen, a co-founder of Google Maps and Google Wave, who spent about a year rejecting every candidate she proposed as a technical co-founder. Cameron Adams, a former Google designer and co-founder of email startup Fluent, joined as third co-founder and chief product officer in June 2012 after Perkins persisted past his refusal, his credibility helping unlock the seed round.¹

What she built

Between 2012 and 2013, Canva raised a seed round of about $3 million from roughly 30 investors, led by Rick Baker's Blackbird Ventures, alongside a A$1.4 million government matching grant. It launched publicly on January 1, 2013, reporting more than 750,000 users in its first year.³ Its valuation then climbed from roughly A$1 billion in January 2018 to a peak of US$40 billion in September 2021, reset to about US$26 billion in 2022, and reached about US$42 billion at an August 2025 employee share sale.²

By the mid-2020s Canva reported roughly 220 million monthly users, about 5,500 employees, and around US$4 billion in annual revenue across more than 190 countries, staying profitable while scaling. It acquired stock media libraries Pixabay and Pexels in 2019, creative suite Affinity for about $380 million in 2024, and AI image generator Leonardo.ai the same year. Perkins married Obrecht in January 2021; the couple signed the Giving Pledge that year, committing at least half their fortune to philanthropy, including $150 million to GiveDirectly's Malawi cash-transfer program.²

How she operates

Perkins describes deliberately building a smaller version of the vision first, using Fusion Books to prove viability and attract capital before attempting the full product. She frames persistence as strategy rather than temperament, treating rejections as data to refine the pitch, and has said rejection hurt but failure was never an option.¹ Learning kitesurfing to reach a venture network she had no other way into reflects the same pattern, a calculation, in her words, of serious risk against the reward of starting a company. On who would be CEO, Obrecht settled it by saying simply that Perkins was better.³

Where things stand

As of 2026, Perkins remains founder and CEO of Canva, still private and last marked at roughly US$42 billion. The company is pushing into AI-assisted design through its Magic Studio features and professional-tier tools through the Affinity acquisition, while expanding into enterprise, education, and document and video products beyond the template editor. Perkins was named to Forbes' World's 100 Most Powerful Women in 2023 and to Fortune's Most Powerful Women lists; the Australian Financial Review put the couple's joint net worth at A$14.14 billion in May 2025.²

Key facts

• Sold handmade scarves at 14; co-founded Fusion Books at 19 from her mother's living room with a $50,000 loan.
• Vetted her first outside developer by having him build a working Internet Explorer 6 drag-and-drop demo before signing a contract.
• Faced more than 100 investor rejections and learned to kitesurf for informal access to Silicon Valley investors through Bill Tai's network.
• Lars Rasmussen spent roughly a year rejecting proposed technical co-founders before approving Cameron Adams, whose join unlocked the $3 million seed round.
• Canva's valuation ran from about $1 billion in 2018 to a peak of $40 billion in 2021, reset to $26 billion in 2022, then to roughly $42 billion in an August 2025 employee share sale.
• She and Cliff Obrecht signed the Giving Pledge in 2021, committing $150 million to GiveDirectly's Malawi cash-transfer program.