Melanie Perkins

The clues that Melanie Perkins would grow up to become a successful founder were there from an early age. She made her first dollars selling spray-on tattoos at a local fair, in Perth, Australia, where she grew up. At just 14 she started a business making and selling scarves in the local markets and boutiques. This entrepreneurial streak would lead to her becoming the CEO of Australia’s first female-founded tech unicorn and one of the youngest self-made female billionaires in the world.

Melanie was born in Perth in 1987. Her mother worked as a teacher and her father is an engineer. By the time she finished secondary school and entered the University of Western  Australia, she was coming up with ideas about how technology could streamline creative tasks. She was tutoring students in design and saw first-hand how difficult they found design tools like InDesign.

She teamed with then‑boyfriend Cliff Obrecht to create Fusion Books in 2007, an online drag‑and‑drop yearbook builder. The company may have been started in her mother’s living room, but it became Australia’s largest yearbook publisher and grew to operate in New Zealand and France.

Melanie started to consider how the Fusion Books platform could be used beyond year books. In 2010, met with investor, Bill Tai, at the Western Australia Inventor of the Year Awards and pitched her concept for an all-in-one design platform. He invited her to Silicon Valley to have another meeting and to attend his famous kite-surfing/entrepreneur conference, “Mai Tai”. Melanie promptly leaned to kite-surf in a bid to get closer to investors.

Tai had introduced her to ex-Google designer, Cameron Adams, who joined as co-founder. He also introduced her to Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps, who became her tech advisor and helped her to hire her first team of engineers. She incorporated Canva as a parent company for Fusion Books and the expanded platform went live in 2013.

Headquartered in Sydney, Canva operates a freemium model, with a generous free tier and subscriptions for Canva Pro, Teams and Enterprise. According to latest figures in December 2024, Canva now has 220 million monthly active users.

Canva’s Sydney headquarters is known as Canva Campus, Melanie champions radical transparency, talking new starters through the latest investor decks – giving staff, affectionately called “Canvanauts”, the context they need to make the right decisions.

Diversity is important as the business scales: Melanie implemented policies designed to eliminate bias in the hiring process and has 41 per cent female representation in the company. The leadership also sets hiring targets for under‑represented minorities.

In parallel, the Canva for Education program offers the full suite free to schools, while Canva for Nonprofits donates premium licenses to more than 250,000 charitable organisations. In 2021 Melanie and Cliff pledged to give away 30 per cent of their Canva wealth to philanthropic causes through the Canva Foundation. "