Melanie Perkins: The Canva Founder’s Story for Investors

Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, an angel investing community where aspiring and active angels learn from Hustle Fund’s approach, review curated deal flow, and connect with peers.

Melanie Perkins built Canva after testing an online design tool with school yearbooks and working through years of fundraising objections. For anyone learning to assess founders, her early decisions reveal the difference between evidence available before launch and a success story told afterward.

Who is Melanie Perkins?

Melanie Perkins is the Australian co-founder and CEO of Canva, the visual communication and design platform she built with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams. Before Canva, Perkins and Obrecht started Fusion Books, an online tool for designing school yearbooks, in 2007.

By the time she was pitching a broader design platform, she had experience selling software, serving customers, and running a small company. Canva grew from work on a specific customer problem.

Fusion Books gave the idea a starting point

While tutoring university students in Perth, Perkins watched people struggle to learn design software. She saw an opportunity for tools that were easier to use, online, and collaborative. School yearbooks gave her and Obrecht a manageable place to begin.

Teachers and students needed to assemble a finished book without becoming professional designers. Fusion Books let them create their own layouts, while the founders handled the practical work of getting books produced. They worked from her mother’s living room, which also housed printing equipment. In her Entrepreneur interview, Perkins described how the business expanded into France and New Zealand before Canva.

For an early investor, that history would have supplied concrete evidence of customer knowledge and execution. It would still leave open whether the same approach could work across presentations, marketing materials, and other design tasks.

A school buying a yearbook has a deadline, a clear deliverable, and an identifiable buyer. A general-purpose design platform has to find reasons for many different people to return. Evidence from the first business could support the second idea without proving its entire market.

How the early fundraising unfolded

In her Entrepreneur interview, Perkins described continuing after a 100th “no” and revising her pitch after every meeting, more than 100 times in a year, to address objections.

Her own account of fundraising reproduces rejection emails citing different concerns, including distance from investors, the technical team, pre-launch risk, and price. Those are separate judgments. An investor unable to support an Australian company had a different objection from one unconvinced that the team could build the product.

The founders also worked on the team itself. Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen helped connect them with Cameron Adams, who became Canva’s third co-founder. Bill Tai and Rasmussen were among the early backers. Canva’s March 2013 announcement described a $3 million seed financing package and noted support from the Australian government’s Commercialisation Australia program.

Investors can separate three things during diligence, the work of evaluating a company before investing:

• Investor fit: Geography, a fund’s investment rules, and available time can prevent a deal even when an investor likes the company.
• Company risk: Missing capabilities, uncertain demand, and an unfinished product need evidence or a credible plan.
• Deal fit: An investor can believe in the business and still disagree with the proposed price.

A long list of passes doesn’t establish that a startup is good or bad. Canva’s later success also doesn’t reveal what every investor knew at the time. To learn from a rejection story, you need the original concern and the evidence that followed.

Comparing interpretations with other investors can reveal assumptions in your own reasoning. Our Angel Squad local meetups bring members together in person.

Building Canva meant changing the first user experience

Canva launched publicly in 2013. Before launch, the team’s user testing exposed a problem: people hesitated to click, struggled to create something they liked, and left discouraged. Perkins described months spent improving users’ first steps in the product so they could become comfortable designing.

The team observed a gap between its intended experience and what people did, then changed the product. Our co-founder and general partner Eric Bahn defines hustle as “great execution meets high velocity.” Applied to diligence, that means examining the work a founder ships and what they learn from it.

A practical follow-up is to ask for an example of a product decision that changed after customers struggled. The evidence might include a recording of someone trying the product, the revised experience, and whether more people completed the task afterward. A polished demo can conceal that history; an account of failed attempts can expose it.

Canva’s growth and Perkins’s philanthropy are distinct

Canva’s company timeline records its first year of profitability in 2017. In September 2021, Canva raised US$200 million at a US$40 billion valuation in a round led by T. Rowe Price. That was a valuation attached to a particular financing, not Perkins’s personal cash wealth or a realized return for every shareholder.

The company also expanded through acquisitions. Canva acquired professional design software business Affinity in March 2024 and image-generation company Leonardo.Ai in 2024. Those deals belong to Canva’s corporate history.

Perkins and Obrecht joined the Giving Pledge in 2021, committing to give away the majority of their wealth during their lifetimes or through their wills. Their letter connects building Canva with their ambition to do good. A pledge describes an intention and commitment; it doesn’t mean the full amount has already been donated.

For investors, a founder’s stated mission is a starting point for discussing priorities. It cannot establish how the founder will handle every difficult hiring, spending, or oversight decision. Those decisions deserve their own diligence.

What angel investors can take from her story

Investors need to distinguish observed progress from the next assumption. Our approach to evaluating early-stage founders starts with what the team knows, what it has done, and what remains uncertain.

For a company moving from a narrow product to a broader market, three questions help keep the discussion concrete:

1. Which evidence transfers? A founder’s existing customer relationships or workflow knowledge may carry over. Demand, buying behavior, and acquisition costs in the new market may differ.
2. What changed after feedback? Look for a specific decision and its result. More meetings or a longer deck alone don’t establish progress.
3. What would weaken the investment case? Name a result that would change your view, such as customers failing to return after completing their first task. Record it before the outcome becomes known.

An investment memo can hold those answers in a few paragraphs. It should distinguish facts, assumptions, and unresolved risks so you can revisit the reasoning later. That makes discussion with other investors more useful than comparing enthusiasm for a founder.

Our co-founder and general partner Elizabeth Yin wrote in Democratizing Knowledge, “Don't try to pick a co. Select a portfolio.” Studying Perkins can improve the questions you ask. It cannot make the next founder’s outcome predictable.

Startup investing is risky, and most bets may fail. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission highlights the risk of total loss and the difficulty of selling private investments. Thoughtful diligence cannot remove those risks.

If you want to practice evaluating founder evidence and compare your reasoning with other aspiring and active angels, apply to Angel Squad.