Canva brings graphic design app to businesses, raises another $6M

Canva, a startup from Australia that makes graphic design simple for users through its web app, announced today a funding round of US$6 million and a whole new product aimed at companies, appropriately dubbed Canva for Work. The round was led by Matrix Partners and Shasta Ventures from Silicon Valley, and Asia-Pacific firms Blackbird Ventures and AirTree Ventures.

“We think Canva for Work has the potential to entirely transform the way design works at every organization, from startups to Fortune 500 companies,” Canva CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins tells Tech in Asia. The funding is expected to be used to “get Canva for Work into the hands of as many people as possible,” she adds.

The company isn’t sharing many details about Canva for Work at the moment, choosing instead to address the opportunity it sees in scaling up its service. “Every brand we’ve spoken to faces the same problem,” Perkins says. “In today’s world there are so many people responsible for producing visual content, not just designers. Social media marketers are expected to produce multiple visuals for every social network each day and salespeople need to create presentations and proposals for clients. However in each organization, there are limited designers who are stretched thin. Canva for Work will make it easier for brands to ensure every piece of marketing material or document is on-brand.”

While one would expect larger businesses to pony up for a professional designer, or even a team of them, it might admittedly be a luxury for several smaller businesses. Sometimes, all you need is to whip up an image for your social media page or your blog post that looks a little better than what you can conjure up with MS Paint, but simply can’t afford to hire a designer, or can’t spare the time to figure out Adobe’s powerhouse.

“We recently ran a survey with 500 small and medium business owners, and found that 78 percent of companies have people who are not professional designers creating customer facing marketing materials,” Perkins says. While Canva can no more replace a professional designer than Instagram can replace Annie Leibovitz, such small companies can probably use a simpler and more cost-effective solution.

Getting to work

While Canva for Work will charge a subscription fee for use by businesses, the company will continue supporting Canva for individual users. “We plan on continuing to offer the Canva that people know as a free product,” Perkins explains. “Canva for Work will really extend the potential of Canva and make it much easier for individuals and teams to create beautifully branded marketing materials and documents.”

The company already has an iPad app out, and will be looking to expand the product in the future. “Our vision is to allow everyone to frictionlessly take an idea and turn it into a design,” Perkins says. “We’re really only at the start of our journey, and have lots of exciting plans.”

Canva claims it has grown to 2.4 million users in the past 20 months. It did not clarify how many of those are active users, but said in a statement that 65 percent of them have joined in the last six months. According to Perkins, 18.5 million designs have been created using the service. There are now more than 200,000 organizations represented on it, which Canva wants to cater to with the Canva for Work product.

The new product is expected to launch next month according to Canva, but companies can already pre-register to try it on the company’s website. Canva previously raised US$6.6 million in two funding rounds involving prominent Australian and US investors like Matrix Partners, Shasta Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Facebook’s director of engineering Lars Rasmussen, and Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman. It has also notably recruited former Apple chief evangelist, Guy Kawasaki.