Canva nears $1.5bn share sale ahead of potential public listing

Early investors and employees at the graphic design juggernaut are set to sell $1.5bn worth of stock to new investors as the company finalises a deal on a major share sale.

Canva co-founders Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins and Cameron Adams launched the company, which now has a valuation of $US26bn, a decade ago. Picture: Britta Campion

Longtime investors and employees at Canva are set for a $US1bn ($1.48bn) payday, with the company close to finalising a deal on the sale of a tranche of shares ahead of a potential public listing.

The Australian-owned digital design and visual communication platform won’t raise any money from the deal, which is set to value the company at $US26bn and involve early investors and staff selling stock to new investors, according to US reports.

The news, first reported in The Information, comes after a similar deal the company struck last August that involved Blackbird selling a 3 per cent stake to US investors – including Coatue Management and ICONIQ Capital, which valued the company at a similar amount.

ICONIQ functions as a family office for the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey, while Coatue Management is the hedge fund led by famed ‘Tiger Cub’ portfolio manager Philippe Laffont.

A Canva spokesman could not be reached for comment about the latest share sale.

Cameron Adams, Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht founded the company a decade ago. Its design templates, which proliferate across businesses, school projects and social media accounts, are easily identified by their playful fonts and ­palette.

One of Australia’s success stories, Canva’s $US25.5bn valuation is down 35 per cent from a peak of $US40bn in September 2021 but Mr Obrecht said last August that its valuation was “solid” compared to other software companies, many of whom have been forced into mass lay-offs due to the deepening tech downturn.

“I think all things considered with most tech companies down more than 50 per cent, I think the valuation is solid,” Mr Obrecht said at the time.

“What I think it speaks to most is the confidence investors have in Canva to grow beyond this. They’re obviously deploying large sums of money in order to see a return on that, and so it really speaks to their confidence in the business that it will continue to grow, and that trajectory will continue to accelerate.”

At $38.4bn in Australian dollars, Canva’s latest valuation would place it firmly in the ASX 20, if it were listed in Australia, ahead of Aristocrat Leisure, James Hardie, REA Group, Santos and WiseTech Global.

But Canva is likely to opt for a US listing, following the template of Atlassian, which it’s often compared to, with such a move expected within the next 18 months.

Canva’s valuation has seesawed over the past two years. Investor T Rowe Price reportedly marked down its stake by 68 per cent in June, while Franklin Templeton also cut its valuation by 10 per cent last year, after lifting it by 22 per cent in 2022.

Blackbird’s sale of $150m of its shares last August equated to about 3 per cent of its total stake.

Blackbird’s First Fund invested $3m into Canva a decade ago. As of last August, that shareholding is now worth more than $1bn.

Blackbird’s investors include a host of the nation’s largest superannuation funds including AustralianSuper, Hostplus, HESTA, Telstra Super, Aware Super and the Future Fund.