In 2008, a 19-year-old Melanie Perkins was sitting in her mom’s living room in Perth, Western Australia—one of the most isolated cities on Earth—teaching PowerPoint to university students as a side hustle.
She noticed something absurd: every student spent the first six weeks of the course just learning how to drag boxes around and change fonts. If it was this painful to make a simple class presentation, how would normal humans ever design anything beautiful?
That observation became an obsession.
By age 22 she had been rejected by over 100 venture capitalists.
By age 25 she was running a company no one wanted to fund.
By age 36 (today, November 2025), she is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, co-founder and CEO of Canva—valued at $40 billion after its latest secondary round, used by 200 million people a month in 190 countries, and profitable since 2017.
This is the real story of how a failed wedding-yearbook startup became the design platform that finally democratized creativity—and how Melanie turned 100 nos into a 40-billion-dollar yes.
Chapter 1: The Side Hustle That Planted the Seed (2007–2011)
Perth is 17 hours ahead of Silicon Valley and feels like the end of the world. There are no tech meetups, no accelerators, no famous angels. The only investors are mining billionaires who want to fund iron-ore ports.
Melanie didn’t care. While studying communications, psychology, and commerce at the University of Western Australia, she started Fusion Books—an online tool that let high-school students drag-and-drop photos and text to create their graduation yearbooks.
She built the first version herself in her bedroom using basic PHP and a lot of coffee. Her mom (a high-school art teacher) became head of customer support. Her boyfriend Cliff Obrecht (now husband and Canva COO) quit university to join full-time as the only other employee.
By 2011 Fusion Books was the largest yearbook publisher in Australia, profitable, and operating in France and New Zealand too. Revenue: a few million dollars. Employees: 12. Glamorous? No. But it proved one thing—normal people would pay for dead-simple design software.
Melanie’s bigger vision was already burning: “If we can make yearbooks easy, why not everything—flyers, posters, presentations, social media?”
She called the dream “Fusion Pro” and started pitching investors in 2010.
Chapter 2: The 100 Rejections (2011–2012)
Melanie flew to San Francisco with a 120-slide deck and boundless optimism.
The feedback was brutal:
“You’re too young.”
“You’re from Australia.”
“Design software is a solved problem—Adobe owns it.”
“We only invest in teams with PhDs from Stanford.”
One investor literally laughed her out of the room.
She kept count. By the end of 2012 she had heard “no” from exactly 102 venture capitalists and angels.
She slept on couches, ate cup noodles, and once spent Christmas alone in a San Francisco Airbnb because she couldn’t afford the flight home.
The lowest moment came when Bill Tai—a famous kite-surfing VC—told her after the 99th rejection: “I love your passion, but the market is too big and too hard. Come back when you have a real business.”
Instead of quitting, she asked Bill for advice on who he respected most in San Francisco. He said Cameron Adams, ex-Google designer who had just sold his startup for $40 million.
Melanie cold-emailed Cameron that night. Subject line: “I’ve been rejected 99 times and I’m not stopping.”
Cameron replied in 20 minutes: “Come over coffee tomorrow.”
Chapter 3: The Co-Founder Trifecta (2012)
Cameron flew to Perth on his own dime. After three days locked in Melanie’s mom’s living room with Cliff, the three of them decided to go all-in.
They named the company Canva (Melanie’s mom suggested it because it sounded like “canvas”) and set one insane rule: the product had to be so simple that Melanie’s mom—an art teacher with zero tech background—could use it on day one.
They launched a private beta in August 2012 with 50 design types and a $3 million seed round from investors who had previously rejected Melanie solo but now couldn’t ignore the three-person dream team.
Chapter 4: The Launch Nobody Noticed (2013)
Canva publicly launched on August 26, 2013.
TechCrunch ignored it.
Product Hunt didn’t exist yet.
The first-day traffic: 750 signups—mostly Australian teachers and Melanie’s Facebook friends.
But something magical happened: people started sharing their designs on Facebook with the watermark “Made with Canva.” Virality kicked in. By Christmas 2013 they had 50,000 users. By the end of 2014: 600,000.
They never spent a dollar on advertising in the first five years.
Chapter 5: The Inflection Points
2015 – Guy Kawasaki joins as Chief Evangelist after Melanie cold-DM’d him on Twitter. He brings 1.8 million followers and Silicon Valley credibility overnight.
2017 – Canva becomes profitable on $23 million revenue. Melanie and Cliff get married the same year on a tiny island with 25 guests.
2018 – First $1 billion valuation after a round led by Sequoia and Blackbird.
2019 – Launch of Canva Pro, Teams, and Print. Revenue hits $200 million.
2020 – COVID forces the entire world to create from home. Canva grows from 20 million to 55 million monthly users in 12 months.
2023 – Canva acquires Affinity (professional design suite) for $1.7 billion in cash—its first big acquisition and a direct shot across Adobe’s bow.
2025 – Canva surpasses 200 million monthly users, launches Canva AI (Magic Studio), and quietly passes $2 billion annual recurring revenue. Valuation in secondary markets has touched $40 billion—larger than Adobe’s market cap was in 2008 when Melanie started getting rejected.
Why Canva Won When Everyone Said It Would Fail
1. Relentless focus on non-designers
Adobe built for pros. Canva built for the 99% who just need a beautiful poster for their kid’s lemonade stand.
2. The “mom test” as product philosophy
Every feature still has to pass the art-teacher test.
3. Compound virality
Every design shared on social media was free advertising.
4. Australian stubbornness + Perth isolation
Being 15,000 km away from Silicon Valley drama turned out to be a feature, not a bug.
5. Long-term greed
Melanie and Cliff still own ~30% of the company because they never sold shares in early rounds.
The Quote That Defines Her
In a 2024 interview Melanie finally answered the question everyone asks—how did she handle 100 rejections?
“I stopped counting at 100 because it stopped mattering. Every ‘no’ just meant I was one step closer to the person who would say yes. And honestly… I was having too much fun building to care.”
Today, when a new designer joins Canva on day one, they are handed a coffee mug that reads:
“Rejected by 100 VCs. Worth $40 billion. Keep going.”
The mug.”
The kid from Perth who couldn’t get a meeting in 2011 now has presidents, pop stars, and every Fortune 500 CMO using her product.
And she’s still only 37.
The wedding-startup that failed became the company that made design free for the world.
Sometimes the biggest visions start with the smallest possible product—and the thickest skin.