Canva becomes Australia’s only privately backed tech startup to be valued at $1B

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-08/sequoia-backed-canva-becomes-australia-s-only-tech-unicorn

by dannyw • 9 years ago

65 60 9 years ago

bloomberg.com

elvinyung• 9 years ago

Is Atlassian not considered Australian?

(Well, I guess it's public now.)

lurr• 9 years ago

My first thought as well.

Are they excluded for going public? Weren't they over a billion well before that?

Or did they not take outside money?

ProAm2• 9 years ago

Pretty sure they moved years ago because of taxes. [1]

[1] http://www.afr.com/leadership/entrepreneur/atlassian-leads-c...

i3862• 9 years ago

Just because your company is incorporated in Delaware does not mean its running the show there.

glangdale• 9 years ago

They are UK-headquartered and list on the NASDAQ. Not sure what proportion of employees are Australian and spiritually I would still claim them as Australian. They would also have comfortably been a unicorn-level company before the UK restructure and the listing, with substantial profits.

chrisco2552• 9 years ago

Nope, Atlassian's HQ is Sydney. Definitely Australian-based.

glenngillen• 9 years ago

I’m going to guess that the “privately backed” qualifier either disqualifies them because they’re now public, or because they reached the $1B valuation before they took VC money.

Similar story with most other AU companies that have reached that level, local IPO early or reach the valuation without institutional money. The latter also meaning valuation is pure external speculation.

chrisco2552• 9 years ago

Atlassian is certainly an Australian company. HQ is Sydney, both co-founders are Australian, and probably more employees in that office than any other.

flgb• 9 years ago

Atlassian is definitely Australian. But if we count them, there are a lot more Australian tech businesses worth more than US$1B: Acconex was just bought by Oracle for US$1.2B, and we have tech businesses from the last web boom like Seek.com (~US$5B), or going even further back, businesses like MYOB (~US$1.7B).

freeelncer• 9 years ago

I wish the day will come where we’ll stop callimg companies “Unicorns” that are “valued” at a billion dollar based on equity negotiations done by investors and founders and instead, call companies unicorns when they “profit” a billion dollars a year. That, my friend, is an achievement worth giving a mythical name.

supertiger• 9 years ago

craigslist is probably close to qualify in your definition

lettergram• 9 years ago

About $500 million profit, with ~$700 million revenue. Still kind of shy, but that profit is pretty astounding!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist

hoodoof2• 9 years ago

A thing is worth what someone else will give you for it.

You're asking for the core mechanism of wealth creation in technology to be dispelled.

If enough people, over a credible amount of time, say that a company is increasing in value, and if they back each such assertion with a small percentage of that stated value, then eventually said company can be taken to the public who hopefully will agree and put up their money to validate the game.

cornholio• 9 years ago

A thing is worth what someone else will give you for it.

You are correct, however, selling 0.00001% of my company to some schmuck for 100$ does not mean people are willing to give me 1 billion dollars for te rest of it. Many so called "unicorns" seem to be closer to that scenario than to actually having a market valuation of 1 billion dollars.

rdlecler1• 9 years ago

Most 409a valuations will value the common at around 1/3rd the price of the last preferred and of course you need to discount the preferred lower in the stack so it’s not as simple as #outstanding shares x $highest preferred unless you have a liquidity event where someone has set the price for the common shares.

Retric• 9 years ago

If I invest X money at Y 'valuation', but I get more than just stock such as liquidation preferences, then the stock alone it's not actually worth X money. Or if you prefer my stock + what else I get is worth X money, but the other shareholders lost something of value.

Thus the company is not actually worth Y valuation and pretending otherwise ignores the terms of the deal.

EX: If the company is nominally worth 1 billion at the time of investment, and later sold for 900 million the last investor may actually have profited via money that early investors never received.

sigstoat• 9 years ago

You're asking for the core mechanism of wealth creation in technology to be dispelled.

what is, or is not referred to as a "unicorn" is not a core mechanism of wealth creation.

all they said was "I wish ... call companies unicorns when they “profit” a billion dollars a year."

obviously the valuation mechanism can't change, but we could all agree to be less impressed by noisy valuations, and more impressed by realized profits.

adventured5• 9 years ago

I find it very useful for one reason: the senationalism around it makes the companies far easier to track and learn about because they frequently pop up in the media thereafter. Typically you're going to get a lot more articles written about you at a $1b valuation than at $200m. There are hundreds upon hundreds of interesting technology companies around the world, most are difficult to learn about initially, or to find at all. The unicorn / billion dollar tag gets them plastered everywhere.

joejerryronnie• 9 years ago

In the case of $1 billion in profits, we should call those companies Sumatran Rhinos or some other endangered species. While very rare, they are still real animals. In my opinion (not speaking of Canva in particular), equating a billion dollar startup with no profits and a questionable business model to a mythical creature which only children believe in is quite apropos.

raisintoast• 9 years ago

Profit (whether gross, operating, or net) is also an imperfect measure. For many extremely fast growing companies, being profitable is a bad thing; it's what happens when they run out of ways to re-invest revenue into growth.

siddharthdeswal• 9 years ago

Good point, I'll be happy to refer to a company as a unicorn if they do 1 billion in annual revenue and positive net profit.

i3862• 9 years ago

Worked at Canva two years ago - what an incredibly bright team! CEO Melanie Perkins is an inspiring visionary. Congratulations on the new valuation!

senatorobama• 9 years ago

FOMO for those RSUs? ;)

dannyw• 9 years ago

Same here! Worked at Canva during 2016. One of the most amazing experiences in my life so far.

somtum• 9 years ago

Amazing product. Curious on what their stack is like?

Torn• 9 years ago

Depends on the role; check out the job profiles here https://about.canva.com/careers/sydney/

hit8run• 9 years ago

After tax loss of 3.3 million while having a revenue of 23.5 million Australian Dollars and this company gets this crazy high valuation... Puh it worked for Facebook but they were attracting users like crazy. I don’t know much about canva so maybe someone that knows better can explain to me what makes their product so special?

hoodoof2• 9 years ago

The question is, what would a high quality online design program be worth to a company with a large user base to feed products into? i.e. what is this company worth as an acquisition to Microsoft/Goog etc

nkkollaw4• 9 years ago

It's basically the most promising competitor to Photoshop for creating graphics.

Very cool product.

pavanlimo• 9 years ago

I just gave it a go and it didn't really look like a Photoshop replacement, more like a really trimmed version of Photoshop. But for the usecases it serves, it's probably enough. Not an expert in this domain but I'm struggling to see its value at $1B. May be the community is high quality and large?

dav43• 9 years ago

I used it to see what it was like and I cannot for the life of me see why it has a billion dollar valuation. Its like pixlr.com?

pedalpete• 9 years ago

i hadn't seen pixlr before, it's beautiful. But canva has been making inroads in the enterprise space. Difficult to displace once all your digital assets are managed by a service for multiple designers. Then they provided a print service too.

They're executing really well in key areas.

rifung• 9 years ago

After tax loss of 3.3 million while having a revenue of 23.5 million Australian Dollars

According to my friend who works there, they haven't really been trying to monetize yet so perhaps the investors think that when they try to monetize it will be easy to be profitable?

At least when comparing to FB, FB's path to monetization seemed more difficult in my opinion.

clusmore• 9 years ago

Somebody please correct me, because it sounds like they're saying a $40m investment got them to a $1b valuation, which would mean the investors (Sequoia, Blackbird and Felicis) got 4% between them? Why would they take such little equity?

adventured5• 9 years ago

If that's all correct, it's because it was what they could get for now. It'd likely be just to wet their beak, get an inside track, form a relationship, and they're looking to get more in future rounds. Sometimes companies that aren't desperate for outside funding will do a slower walk-up on partnerships with VCs, which I think can make a lot of sense if you have the luxury to do it.

bigiain2• 9 years ago

In the article the cofounder says it was "an offer we couldn't refuse". I guess she meant in a "You'll give us _how_ much for less than 5%??? You're joking? No? DONE!" way, rather than a "Nice business you've got here, it'd be a pity if anything happened to it." or a "We know where your children go to school" kind of way...

Jyaif• 9 years ago

So all it takes for a unicorn to exist is somebody buying a billionth of a company for $1.

nkkollaw4• 9 years ago

Yes but they spent 40m. Hardly the same thing.

dang• 9 years ago

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

faitswulff• 9 years ago

I use Canva a ton for simple graphic designs. It's great that you can access it wherever there's a browser, use it for (mostly) free, and it's extremely user-friendly. Great product, good to see them doing well!

nitin_flanker• 9 years ago

This is what I like most about Canva too. They are always improving their tool with new UI and features without ever forcing me to buy the "Canva for work". They are also great at accepting feedbacks.

mmjaa• 9 years ago

How does it compare with h5mag.com, which is what I currently use to do all this .. ?

quickthrower22• 9 years ago

"Only Tech Unicorn" is questionable. In addition to this and Atlassian, there is also WisetechGlobal https://www.marketindex.com.au/asx/wtc - market cap $4Bn.

ajdlinux2• 9 years ago

TechnologyOne (ASX:TNE), an enterprise software company focused on government/public sector, has a market cap of AU$1.56bn.

gexla• 9 years ago

Unicorn is a startup term. Atlassian is TEAM on the NASDAQ.

esseeayen• 9 years ago

Well technically if it's listed on the ASX then it's gone public, i.e. Exited, so typically not called a unicorn.

quickthrower22• 9 years ago

Fair enough but relatively recently listed. I guess Australia is probably a serial unicorn maker.

Canva becomes Australia’s only privately backed tech startup to be valued at $1B

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