Melanie Perkins built Canva from an idea rejected by more than 100 venture capital firms into one of the most widely used design platforms in the world, and in July 2026 she took the next concrete step in a promise she and her husband and Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht made years ago: to eventually give away a 30% stake in the company. The new initiative, called the Global Goals Platform and funded through the couple’s Canva Foundation, will survey citizens across the globe about the changes they’d most like to see in the world — an initial, deliberately broad step before the foundation commits further capital to specific causes.
The Canva Foundation has already distributed more than $80 million through 2025, including more than $50 million of a $150 million pledge toward eradicating extreme poverty in Malawi through its partner organization GiveDirectly, which provides unconditional cash transfers directly to households living in extreme poverty. Perkins and Obrecht’s giving pledge is structured around Canva’s own valuation, which stood at roughly $42 billion as of mid-2026 — meaning the eventual 30% commitment represents one of the largest single philanthropic pledges tied to a private technology company anywhere in the world.
From Rejected Pitch to AI Platform
Perkins co-founded Canva in 2012 alongside Obrecht and Cameron Adams, originally as a simpler alternative to complex design software like Adobe’s suite, aimed at people without professional design training. The company’s early fundraising was notoriously difficult — Perkins has spoken publicly about being turned down by more than 100 investors before finally securing backing. Canva has since grown into one of the most valuable private software companies globally, ending 2025 with monthly active users up 20% year-over-year to 265 million, and marking eight consecutive years of profitability — a rare combination of scale and financial discipline in the software industry.
Perkins and her co-founders have also been repositioning Canva’s core product strategy over the past year, moving the company from being described as “a design platform with AI features” to “an AI platform with design tools layered on top.” That shift has produced new products including Canva Code, Canva Sheets, and a mini-apps builder aimed at letting non-technical users build simple software tools the same way Canva already let them build visual designs. The company’s B2B segment — enterprise and team accounts, as opposed to individual free users — grew 100% in 2025 to reach $500 million in revenue, a signal that Canva’s expansion beyond casual, consumer-style design use into serious enterprise software spend is working.
A Different Model From Silicon Valley’s Usual Giving Pledges
Perkins and Obrecht’s approach differs in a meaningful way from many prior tech-founder giving pledges: rather than committing to a fixed dollar figure disbursed over time, they structured their commitment as an equity stake in Canva itself, meaning the ultimate value of the pledge rises or falls with the company’s own valuation. The Global Goals Platform’s survey-first approach — asking a global public what changes they want to see before committing further capital to specific programs — is also a deliberate departure from the more top-down, board-directed giving structures typical of large corporate foundations, positioning the initiative as more participatory in how it eventually allocates funding.
A Rare Example of Sustained Profitability in Consumer Software
Canva’s eight consecutive years of profitability set it apart from many venture-backed software companies of comparable scale and valuation, a large number of which have historically prioritized user growth over near-term profitability during their private-company years. That financial discipline has given Perkins and her co-founders unusual latitude to fund large philanthropic commitments directly from company performance rather than relying solely on a future public listing or acquisition to realize value for a giving pledge, a distinction that has drawn attention from other founders considering how to structure their own eventual philanthropic commitments while their companies remain privately held.
Canva’s valuation has moved across a series of secondary share sales over the past several years rather than a single formal funding round, with its mid-2026 mark of roughly $42 billion placing it among the ten most valuable venture-backed private software companies in the world. Obrecht, Perkins’ co-founder, husband, and Canva’s chief operating officer, has been an equal partner in structuring both the company’s giving pledge and the Canva Foundation’s specific program choices, including the Malawi-focused poverty eradication partnership with GiveDirectly.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Canva is one of the most widely adopted software tools among Philippine micro, small, and medium enterprises, students, and independent content creators, many of whom rely on its free tier for everything from social media graphics to small-business marketing materials — meaning Canva’s pivot toward an “AI platform” model, including tools like Canva Code aimed at letting non-technical users build simple applications, could meaningfully lower the technical barrier for Filipino founders building their first product without a dedicated engineering team. Perkins’ own fundraising story — more than 100 rejections before Canva’s eventual breakout — is also a genuinely useful, concrete data point for Philippine founders navigating a comparatively thin local venture capital market: persistence through repeated rejection, not a single well-connected pitch, is what actually built one of the most valuable design software companies in the world.
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