If you have yet to be introduced to Canva, behold – what you’re about to learn will change your life as you know it.

Starting 2018 on a very high note, Australia’s graphic design startup reached unicorn status after it raised a massive $40 million in its latest funding round, reports Mashable.

Thanks to the investment led by Sequoia China, Canva is now valued at US $1 billion (that’s the point at which you earn the label ‘unicorn’) – and if you’re still bugging that one graphic design friend to put together those pretty little Facebook posts, then you need to stop.

Like, now – here’s why:

Cofounded by CEO Melanie Perkins [below] –one of Fast Company‘s Most Creative People In Business–the Australian graphic design startup lets users edit photos, add stickers and texts, make pie charts, Venn diagrams, and bar graphs, and design logos, posters, and anything else.

Launched in 2014, the site – pop over here to check it out – focuses on “individual users with the mission of democratising graphic design”:

Perkins says that Canva sees itself as providing graphic design tools for folks who aren’t graphic designers. Adobe, the monster in the design market, has a suite of incredibly powerful, but incredibly difficult to master, software tools, says Perkins, and Canva is hoping to simplify the process of creating visual assets for folks who can’t devote their lives to learning the ins and outs of Adobe’s software.

It’s not just InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator that Canva’s services are looking to topple, but the hegemony of Microsoft’s office suite, as well, Perkins says. And her company’s first target is PowerPoint.

And the first product the company wants to improve is its presentation toolkits. Canva already has a presentation creation suite that people have used to make 30 million presentations, Perkins says. But there’s room to grow in that market.

“PowerPoint has such a stranglehold on the market, but it was designed before the web,” Perkins says, arguing that Canva is the updated toolkit that folks should use for their next big meeting or TED talk.

Because of the site’s ease of use, it has since taken off and is now available n 190 countries, 100 languages and works on every single operating system.

Oh, and get this: more than 13 designs are created on Canva every second.

But while most of it is free, last year it “reached profitability and notched 294 000 paying customers for its design software-as-a-service offering,” reports Tech Crunch:

Teams pay $12.95 per month or a reduced $9.95 per month for a one-time annual subscription for the ability to save designs to different folders, automatically resize their designs to share on social media and to work and share designs with larger groups.

The company also has a design marketplace where designers, illustrators and photographers can share images that Canva users can pay $1 to use in their own work. It takes some of the hassle out of licensing images or designs through other sites.

Although Canva hasn’t touched a cent from its previous two rounds of funding, the cash will now be spent on new product development which is going to be fun for all of us.

Up, up and away.

[source:mashable]