‘Just blows their mind’: Canva in no rush to IPO after $2.3bn share sale beats expectations

A float of tech darling Canva would be a ‘natural path of the evolution’ of the $40bn digital design company, but co-founder Cameron Adams says there is no hurry.

Canva co-founders Cameron Adams (left), Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins. Picture: John Feder

Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams says an IPO would be a “natural path of the evolution” for the Australian-owned digital design and visual communication company, but says it won’t be rushed into hitting the boards.

Canva’s secondary share sale exceeded expectations, delivering a $US1.5bn ($2.28bn) payday to long-term staff and investors, valuing the company at more than $US26bn and paving the way for a potential listing.

The sale, handled by Goldman Sachs, was initially expected to deliver $US1bn.

There has been much speculation about listing in the US in 2025, with Canva following a similar path to another tech darling, Atlassian.

But Mr Adams said there were no immediate plans to float Canva, saying the company would take its time considering an IPO.

“For us, in particular, like an IPO is somewhere in the future. It’s a natural path of evolution,” Mr Adams said.

“We can’t and nor do we want to put a date on it. There’s nothing immediate. There’s no impending deadline or timeline that means we need to IPO.

“So if we are going to do one, we’ll do it under our own steam for our own good reasons, without any pressure being applied. So no plans there.”

Mr Adams founded Canva with Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht more than 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, with the company amassing 170 million active users.

“We founded that 11 years ago now on the basis that design tools were too fragmented, there was too much going on, there was too many decisions to make, and for someone to navigate that, it was too complex,” Mr Adams said.

“So our entire business is built on simplifying and consolidating the design space.”

Crucially, Mr Adams said the business has been profitable for the past seven years, and it has been able to maintain its $US26bn valuation over the past six months at a time when others have fallen.

“Tech valuations over the past 18 months took a real hit all around the world. I’ve been talking to existing investors and other finance folks in this world and the growth that we have shown at Canva just blows their mind.

“It impresses them when they’re thinking about other companies that they might invest in over the next couple of years.

“Being able to show that continued growth, even through economic headwinds that the world has seen over the last year or so – we’ve been profitable for seven years and we continue to be profitable, we’ve grown immensely in terms of user growth, we added 80 or 90 million people in the last year, revenues now over $2bn a year … makes it an easy story to tell investors.”

Companies that have been able to successfully harness the power of AI have also experienced valuation growth, with Microsoft becoming the second company ever to be valued more than $US3 trillion last week.

Apple remains narrowly in first place at $US3.02 trillion after reaching the $US3 trillion market capitalisation mark for the first time in January 2022. But it has fallen below the milestone, even briefly losing the pole position as biggest company on the markets when Microsoft briefly overtook the iPhone maker earlier this month.

Microsoft more than any other tech giant is riding the wave of excitement over AI. The Redmond, Washington-based group has a major partnership with OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, that is reportedly worth $US13bn.

Canva unveiled a suite of AI-powered tools last March, including Magic Design, which allows users to upload any image and automatically generate a design; “Beat Sync” which can automatically match video to a soundtrack; and “Magic Write”, an AI-powered copywriting assistant similar to ChatGPT.

“It’s still a bit amorphous what the shape of AI is going to look like in 10 years, but in some form AI is going to play an important part in the technology scene and building products and services,” Mr Adams said.

“So our ability to rapidly innovate there, given that we’ve had amazing AI and machine learning talent on our team for five or six years now – our ability to capitalise on that in the last 18 months – has really impressed the market has impressed investors, but more importantly for us, has enabled us to have an even better product.”