Canva is today worth nearly $50 billion, and is the tool of choice for millions of non-designers to quickly make graphic designs, but it hasn’t had an easy path to get there.
Canva founder Melanie Perkins revealed the sheer grit and resilience it took to bring her vision to life. Her story highlights the often-unseen uphill battle faced by entrepreneurs, especially in the competitive tech landscape. It took Perkins three years to secure the funding needed to truly launch Canva, a period punctuated by near-constant rejection and self-doubt. Her remarks offer a poignant glimpse into the emotional toll of repeatedly hearing “no” while chasing a dream.
“I was going to San Francisco and just got rejected a lot,” Perkins admitted. Perkins was Australian, and was looking to start Canva in Australia. “I was pitching people, trying to get them to join my tech team. I was pitching investors, trying to get them to invest, and most people were saying no for various reasons.”
Some investors said her timing wasn’t right. “Unfortunately, I do not think that it is quite the right fit just now,” she remembers some VCs telling her. Others felt the valuation she was seeking was too rich. “We’ve reached the conclusion for the 8 million dollar cap is above the top end of what we think is fair value,” others said. Some VCs thought Australia was too far away from Silicon Valley, and this would pose problems. “A lot of people said that they needed to be able to ride their bicycles to our office. They couldn’t really do that from Silicon Valley, and it was set to accept where they weren’t happy to invest in an Australian startup,” she says.
There were other, more fundamental doubts about the viability of Canva’s core concept: “So many other reasons… and each of these hurt a lot. Other people told us that the size of the market—a design product for non-designers—was just like an oxymoron. Why would you do that? There were so many rejections. Each one of them really hurt,” she remembers.
Faced with so many rejections over so many reasons, Perkins acknowledged that she felt like giving up. “But I think that what you feel like doing and what you kind of need to do to actually get to that goal can sometimes be quite opposite things,” she says. Ultimately, Perkins and her team chose to keep trying — and they kept at it for 3 long years.
“So, we persevered for 3 years. It was actually 3 years between first meeting an investor and then actually landing investment. But then, eventually, we raised our seed round and we were extremely excited because, all of a sudden, we could start to grow our team. And we did. After a year of development, we were ready to launch Canva to the world,” she says.
It’s good that they persevered. In 2018, Canva became Australia’s first tech unicorn, and was valued at a billion dollars. In 2025, Canva’s valuation has risen to nearly $50 billion. Perkins, who owns 18 percent of the company, is personally worth $5.8 billion.
Perkins’s journey provides a crucial lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs: success often hinges not just on a good idea, but on the tenacity to weather repeated setbacks. Her story also highlights the challenges faced by startups outside of traditional tech hubs like Silicon Valley. In a world where so much emphasis is placed on overnight successes, Perkins’s candidness about the years of struggle behind Canva’s triumph offers a valuable dose of reality — and inspiration. Her story serves as a powerful reminder that the path to building a multi-billion dollar company is rarely linear, and that perseverance in the face of rejection can be the key to unlocking extraordinary achievements.