Canva - the design platform used by everyone from students to Fortune 500 marketing teams - is now valued at $42 billion and serves roughly a quarter of a billion people each month. Users, designers, and people across the technology industry are debating its move into AI.
Behind all of these decisions is Melanie Perkins, Co-founder and CEO of Canva. Melanie is making choices that affect millions of people. She is willing to change a product people already know and love because she believes standing still would be a greater risk.
That matters to me. Not because it should be surprising that a woman built Canva, but because women are rarely given this much space to take such bold and imperfect risks in public.
Melanie began with a problem most people had simply accepted. At 19, while teaching graphic design part-time at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she noticed that her students spent more time learning complex software than learning how to design. Creativity was not the problem. The tools were.
She decided to start small.
Melanie left school and, along with her partner, Cliff Obrecht, built Fusion Books out of their living room in Australia to help schools create yearbooks online. They cold-called schools to find customers and eventually grew the business beyond Australia. For Melanie, Fusion Books proved design could be simpler and more accessible. It also gave her the confidence to pursue a much bigger idea.
Armed with a paper pitch deck about the future of publishing, she began pitching her vision for an all-in-one design platform. They approached hundreds of investors, facing rejection after rejection, but continued iterating and refining an idea most of the industry couldn’t see yet.
Canva launched in 2013.
Today, Canva employs around 5,000 people, and generates approximately $4 billion in annualized revenue. Looking at Canva now, it is easy to assume that its success was inevitable. It was not.
Canva initially faced resistance from professional designers and spent years rebuilding technology that could no longer support its ambition. Now, as the company positions itself for the AI era, it’s attracting criticism again.
Still, Melanie chooses to move forward.
Canva describes this next chapter as moving “from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design tools.” This initiative is much bigger than adding a few new features. It means reconsidering what Canva fundamentally is.
Melanie could take a safer path and continue growing an already successful product. Instead, she is willing to rethink it before another company forces Canva to do so.
We often praise founders for being visionary. But vision becomes uncomfortable when it changes something we already love.
This is where Melanie’s story becomes personal to me.
We celebrate women when their success looks polished and certain. We are less comfortable watching them experiment, make unpopular decisions, or risk being wrong in front of millions of people.
Women are encouraged to be ambitious, but not too ambitious. We can be confident, as long as we remain agreeable. We can be visionary, as long as our vision does not make others uncomfortable.
Melanie is working beyond those expectations. She is making important decisions at the center of the technology industry and accepting the scrutiny that comes along with them. She also offers a different model of leadership. She is measured, optimistic, and deeply ambitious. She has not needed to become louder, harder, or less human to prove that she belongs at this level.
As a woman working in technology, that is what moves me most.
Melanie’s vision for AI also feels personal. She believes that AI should accelerate human creativity, not override it. Technology should help more people bring their ideas to life.
Her advice to people at the beginning of their own journeys is similarly practical: just get started. Choose a problem you care about and learn what you need along the way.
I have learned this in my own life.
I am not a software engineer, but I work in technology. My sense of belonging did not begin when someone finally declared me technical enough. It grew through doing. I asked questions, led teams, and used AI-assisted tools to build small proofs of concept that help me manage projects, organize my routines, and explore ideas connected to causes I care about, especially animal welfare.
These may not be finished products, but each one allows me to turn a problem or an idea into something tangible. I begin with what I know, then learn what I need to do along the way.
Melanie’s story reminds me that belonging is built through doing. It is not granted by someone else — sometimes, beginning is already proof that we are capable of more than we thought.
Her ambition also extends beyond Canva. Melanie has written that companies have both an opportunity and a responsibility to help create a better world. In 2021, Melanie and Cliff pledged the vast majority of their personal equity, roughly 30% of Canva’s value, to doing good through the Canva Foundation. Their plan is bold: build one of the world’s most valuable companies, then use that value to do as much good as possible.
Melanie shows us that women do not have to choose between ambition and compassion. We can take enormous risks, endure criticism and continue evolving while remaining grounded in optimism and care. She began before she had permission. Now she is reinventing Canva before the world forces her to.
Her story gives me permission to begin before I feel completely ready. It also gives me the courage to keep evolving, even after I succeed. That is the kind of woman in AI I want to learn from, and the kind of woman in technology I want to keep becoming.
Kimy Samaniego is a Client Success and Project Manager at Nymbl. This piece is part of the Women of Nymbl AI series.
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Copy editing assistance from Anthropic Claude
