Aussie unicorn Canva makes 2 acquisitions

Canva, the online design tools startup that last year became a unicorn, is expanding yet again.

It’s acquiring two free stock photo sites – Pexels and Pixabay – to make their 1 million images available to users creating designs within Canva, the Australia-based company announced today. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins / Photo credit: Canva

Canva CEO Melanie Perkins says the acquisitions are aimed at giving users “high-quality ingredients” for their creations – ones that are easy to find, since its app is aimed at people with no illustration experience who’d rather avoid giant apps like Photoshop.

Folks without design experience are generally “stuck with ugly clip art, really heinous fonts, and really bad photos,” Perkins tells Tech in Asia. And so, today’s deal is a bid to solve that.

Unicorn ride

Canva’s latest stats:

• 15 million monthly active users
• 500,000 paying subscribers
• 1.3 billion images created with the app
• Users in 190 countries

Started in 2013, Canva soared to unicorn status in January 2018 after pocketing a fresh US$40 million in funding.

While being a billion-dollar startup was “a huge vote of confidence in the direction we’re headed,” Perkins says unicorn status hasn’t changed the company.

And, she insists, it hasn’t changed her as a CEO: “I’ve always had a very high bar for myself, so I’ve probably always put a lot more pressure on myself than anything external.”

See: Inside the stock images startup that’s going global

But she concedes that the growing team – now 550, up from 250 at the start of last year – makes things rather different.

“There’s a lot of people relying on what we’re doing. Which certainly adds a little bit of pressure,” Perkins adds.

All those new staffers need more space, and that’s why Canva has just moved into an eight-storey building down the road from their old HQ in Sydney.

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