Melanie Perkins co-founded Canva in 2012 with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, aiming to make graphic design accessible to everyone.
In 2012, after building an earlier startup called Fusion Books (an online yearbook design tool) with her partner Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins co-founded Canva together with Obrecht and engineer Cameron Adams. The vision was audacious: to create a simple, browser-based, drag-and-drop design tool that would let anyone—regardless of design training—produce professional-looking graphics, presentations, and marketing materials.
Perkins had identified this gap while teaching design software at the University of Western Australia, watching students struggle for weeks to master complex, expensive professional tools like Adobe InDesign. She believed design should be democratized rather than reserved for trained professionals or agencies with expensive software licenses.
Raising capital as a young woman without a Silicon Valley network was arduous; Perkins famously pitched to over 100 investors across three years, including a rejection from prominent Silicon Valley figures, before finally securing seed funding partly through introductions facilitated by Bill Tai, an investor she met through a kitesurfing connection. Canva officially launched publicly in 2013.
The platform grew explosively, eventually reaching hundreds of millions of users worldwide across education, small business, nonprofit, and enterprise markets. Canva's success established Perkins as one of the most prominent female tech founders globally and proved that a company solving a genuinely global problem could be built and scaled from Australia rather than the traditional US tech corridors.