Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Melanie Perkins started teaching students at the University of Western Australia how to use Microsoft Office and Adobe, then realised the software was too complicated. She had been building a simpler yearbook design tool called Fusion Books on the side. The insight that became Canva was simple and repeatable: design tools should be so easy that anyone could use them, not just trained designers.

Getting investors to agree took time. Over 100 VCs passed. She and co-founder Cliff Obrecht spent years pitching in San Francisco while living out of a friend's place. They finally raised their seed round in 2013 and launched Canva in January.

The 100 Rejections

The rejection story is real and worth dwelling on because it carries a lesson about product-market fit signals that venture investors often miss. When Perkins was pitching Canva in 2011 and 2012, she was not pitching to a market that existed yet. The direct-to-consumer design tools category had no comparable companies to benchmark against. Canva was a bet on behavior change: that non-designers would want design tools if those tools were accessible enough.

Most investors evaluate a market based on what has already worked. Perkins was asking them to evaluate a market that would only exist if her product could create the behavior. That is a genuinely hard pitch. The 100 rejections are less a story about bad investor judgment and more a story about how early-stage category creation is almost impossible to evaluate through conventional VC frameworks.

The investor who eventually said yes to the seed round saw the same thing Perkins saw: a massive number of people who needed to create visual content and had no good tools. That insight turned out to be worth 2 billion.

The Canva Build

Melanie Perkins investments in Canva through her co-founder equity position have tracked the company's extraordinary growth curve. Canva launched with a freemium model and a drag-and-drop interface. By 2017 it was profitable. By 2021 it raised $200 million at a $40 billion valuation.

The pandemic was transformative. Teams moved to remote work. Every presentation, every social media post, every communication asset suddenly needed to be made digitally, collaboratively, without a designer in the room. Canva was the answer for hundreds of millions of people who had never used design software before.

Canva has since made significant acquisitions to deepen its capabilities. It acquired Affinity in 2024, a professional design tools suite that directly competed with Adobe's paid products, and then made Affinity free for all users, a direct challenge to Adobe's business model. It acquired Leonardo AI, the Australian foundational AI model company, in August 2024. It acquired MagicBrief, an AI marketing startup, in June 2025. And in February 2026 it acquired Cavalry, an animation software company, and MangoAI, an advertising performance startup.

As of October 2025, Canva has 260 million users and $3.5 billion in annualized revenue. Revenue had already exceeded $3.3 billion annualized when the company announced its August 2025 employee stock sale at a $42 billion valuation.

The Philanthropy Pledge

Perkins and Obrecht joined the Giving Pledge, committing to transfer more than 80% of their stake to the Canva Foundation for charitable causes. They have donated $50 million to GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that makes direct cash transfers to families in Malawi, and in 2025 committed an additional $100 million to expand that program.

Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund has made the point that the founders who build the most lasting companies tend to be the ones who have a personal mission beyond wealth accumulation. Perkins's decision to pledge the majority of her stake to charity before any IPO changes the alignment structure of the company in ways that are quite unusual. Angel Squad members see that kind of founder alignment as one of the strongest early-stage signals. Explore the community at hustlefund.vc/squad.

The IPO Setup

Canva hired Kelly Steckelberg, former CFO at Zoom, in 2024. It set up a US-based parent entity in early 2025 as structural preparation for a US IPO. Canva's COO Cliff Obrecht said in November 2025 that an IPO is "imminent in the next couple of years." Industry experts point to 2026 as the likely window, with the company's August 2025 $42 billion employee stock sale setting the most recent benchmark valuation.

The company has completed three secondary transactions since April 2024, giving employees and early investors liquidity while maintaining its private status. The IPO, when it comes, will likely be one of the largest tech listings of its year.

Shiyan Koh of Hustle Fund has noted that the most interesting pre-IPO investments are in companies that have already demonstrated 20-plus percent revenue growth at scale, proven unit economics, and a clear product roadmap into adjacent markets. Canva checks all three boxes. Angel Squad members who want to think through how to evaluate late-stage companies on a path to liquidity engage with exactly these questions in community. Find the conversation at hustlefund.vc/squad.‍