Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins launched Canva in 2013 with a vision to make design accessible to anyone—and has since achieved one of the most extraordinary growth stories in software. The company that started with more than 100 investor rejections ended 2025 with monthly active users up 20% to 265 million and eight consecutive years of profitability. Canva, last valued at $42 billion, remains the world's highest-valued female-founded and -led startup—and is now building toward a U.S. stock-market listing. In April, Canva launched its new AI 2.0 platform, its biggest-ever launch, which recast the company as an AI platform with design tools, generating fully editable designs from prompts. But the pivot has proven costly: in August, Canva cut its growth forecast from 30% to 20% after AI serving expenses ballooned.