Exciting news here at Canva!

Truth be told, there’s few days that I don’t pinch myself. We launched Canva to the world just over two years ago and now have five million users around the globe and an incredible supportive, vocal community.

Today marks the start of the next chapter and we couldn’t be more excited to announce our $15M Series A investment led by Felicis Ventures alongside existing investors Blackbird Ventures and Matrix Partners. Our new funding will help us to expand and build what we believe is the future of design and creation.

In just over two years, we have grown to over five million users who have created over 35 million designs. In our last month alone, our five million users have created 5.7 million designs. In addition, our users have written 14,560 blog posts and created 19,500 YouTube videos about Canva.

However, Canva is far from an overnight success. A short eight years ago I was teaching design programs and saw students struggle trying to use them. It seemed apparent that in the future they would be a lot easier to use, online and collaborative. We wanted to bring together all of the high quality professional design ‘ingredients’ (stock photography, fonts, layouts, illustrations) and make them accessible to the whole world so everyone could communicate their ideas. Where products were complex to learn, we wanted to make ours easy. Where other products were intimidating, we wanted ours to be fun. Where products took years to learn, we wanted ours to take seconds.

Canva is quickly becoming the primary design tool for our users who range from marketers, non-profits, bloggers and the education sector. Every day we are hearing amazing stories from our customers who have been able to growtheir social media following, spread awarenessand raise more donations for their charity because of Canva. We’ve read emails from customers who said Canva helped them save dogsfrom death row and catch criminals.

We were excited to see Canva helping individuals around the world to communicate their ideas through design, but we didn’t want to stop there. We wanted to enable teams to work more efficiently together, to stop the wasted time and effort creating marketing materials, to enable brands to easily have a consistent brand identity.

Last month we released Canva for Work which has been adopted rapidly by companies across the globe, including Yelp, Upworthy, and Lonely Planet.

We’re also excited to announce today a program that will enable nonprofits around the globe to access the full power of Canva for Work, free of charge. Each nonprofit can have a team of up to ten people helping to spread their story and raise donations. Nonprofits can apply here.

But there’s still so much left to do. We’re excited to embark on this next chapter of our journey and very pleased to have our amazing community and investors along for the ride.

Melanie