Just 148 days after closing its $70 million Series D, graphic design startup Canva raised another $85 million in a brand new Series E round of funding.
The new deal comes with a valuation of $3.2 billion — up from $2.5 billion from that last funding five months ago. Some napkin math shows that this means the Australian startup's valuation gained something like $5 million per day in between the two announcements.
Wednesday's round was led by Mary Meeker's growth investment firm Bond Capital, which also led Canva's Series D in May. This round also included participation from General Catalyst and Sequoia China, as well as other investors including Bessemer Venture Partners and Blackbird Ventures.
Perkins says that a big part of the reason for all this fundraising is simply the amount of inbound interest from investors. Wednesday's round brings Canva's fundraising total to almost $252.5 million, according to Pitchbook data. That capital is important to helping the company grow, she says — but there's a strategy to raising so frequently, with only relatively small upticks in the valuation each time.
"We've taken an atypical approach to raising funds," Canva cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins told Business Insider. "Rather than taking a large raise at each round, we've taken a lot smaller raise at each step. Our philosophy has been, because we want to build a big company, we are taking smaller dilution."
Canva, one of Australia's most prominent tech startups, built its multi-billion-dollar business on creative tools for freelance, professional, and aspiring designers. The startup's free products include templates for everything from business cards to social media graphics and have skyrocketed in popularity with in-house creative and marketing teams, Perkins said.
To go with the new funding, the startup also announced a new, paid feature for business users, which lets the marketing departments set restrictions on elements like font, color, and templates, to ensure a unified look across the company's communications.
The new feature also includes tools to help business users manage their graphic design projects, including deadlines and feedback — bringing it a little closer to productivity tools like Asana and Figma.
Those kinds of tools have been a hot topic for startups and investors alike after the breakout successes of apps like Slack, Trello, Asana, and Zoom. Slack and Zoom, especially, found their success with a so-called freemium model. They offer a free version to get power users and early adopters within a company hooked, and then offer lucrative subscriptions for when the IT department is ready to roll it out to the rest of the company.
This kind of bottoms-up approach to enterprise sales has proven to work well for cloud software companies like Slack and Zoom, and Canva says that it's following a similar path — with a free version that gets users in the door, and paid features to put it to work.
"It's very similar to Slack," Perkins said of Canva's approach to monetization. "We have viral growth already within the organization, so now we will enable all those people to collaborate as a team while catering to those needs like single sign on and brand control that companies need."
