Start-ups to watch: Bigcommerce, Canva, Nitro and more

Five of the up-and-coming Australian start-ups that you should keep an eye on.

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Bigcommerce

Sydney-born e-commerce platform Bigcommerce’s year has been one big announcement after another, with the company aggressively expanding its global footprint and hiring former PayPal executive Brent Bellm as chief executive. Next year it is eyeing an ASX listing and further expansion in the US. It says it has processed $5bn in total sales and raised more than $100m in venture capital.

Campaign Monitor

Online email marketing firm Campaign Monitor has raised $US250m ($345m), with clients including Coca-Cola, Disney and Rip Curl and more than two million users in 186 countries. The start-up, which has offices in Sydney and San Francisco, says more than a billion emails are sent every month through Campaign Monitor.

SafetyCulture

SafetyCulture, based in Townsville, Queensland, pulled off a major coup last year in receiving investment from Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, who normally limits investments to his venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures. The start-up, which recently raised a $6.1m Series A funding round, has a safety audit app called iAuditor that is making waves worldwide. It is being used by companies including Tesla, Coles and Qantas. Farquhar says he sees a lot of parallels with Atlassian.

Canva

Online design start-up Canva has cemented itself as one of our start-up darlings, landing a $21m funding round in October that values the company at $231m. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins says the company isn’t looking at following in Atlassian’s footsteps right away, but it will spend the next year doubling down on reaching as many users as possible. It now has more than five million.

Nitro

Melbourne-based document productivity company Nitro says it is focusing on transitioning from 10 years as the No 1 replacement for Adobe Acrobat to a cloud-based smart document service, which should unlock new clients and opportunities. “PDF in many organisations has become a place where documents go to die,” CEO Sam Chandler says. “Document productivity and workflow is totally broken in the modern enterprise. We have to reinvent it.”