From Perth to Silicon Valley
In 2007, Melanie Perkins was a 19-year-old university student in Perth, Australia, teaching other students how to use InDesign and Photoshop. The experience left her with a conviction that would define the next decade of her life: design software was needlessly complex, and most people would never learn it. The opportunity was not in building better professional tools. It was in making design accessible to everyone.
Perkins and her partner Cliff Obrecht started with a narrow wedge — school yearbooks. Fusion Books, launched in 2010, let students drag and drop elements to create yearbook pages without any design training. It was not glamorous, but it was real. Within a few years, Fusion Books became the largest yearbook company in Australia, processing thousands of orders and generating meaningful revenue. This was not a slide-deck startup. It was a functioning business with paying customers, shipping a physical product.
But Perkins always saw Fusion Books as a stepping stone toward a much larger vision: a platform that could do for all of graphic design what Fusion Books had done for yearbooks. She started pitching that vision to venture capitalists. The response was overwhelmingly negative. Over the course of three years, she was rejected by more than 100 investors. Many told her the market was too small, that Adobe owned the space, or that a team from Perth could not compete with Silicon Valley startups. She kept going.
The product-first approach
The turning point came through an unlikely channel. In 2012, Perkins attended a technology conference in Perth where she met Bill Tai, a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist known for his investments in Zoom and Tweetdeck. Tai was intrigued by the Fusion Books traction but not yet ready to invest. He invited Perkins to MaiTai, his annual kitesurfing and technology retreat in Hawaii.
At MaiTai, Perkins connected with Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps and Google Wave. Rasmussen saw the potential in what Perkins was building and agreed to become a technical advisor — and eventually Canva's first hire in its Sydney engineering office. His involvement gave the project credibility that years of cold-emailing VCs had not.
What made Canva's eventual fundraise different from the previous 100 rejections was not a better pitch deck. It was that by mid-2013, the product existed.
What made Canva's eventual fundraise different from the previous 100 rejections was not a better pitch deck. It was that by mid-2013, the product existed. Canva had launched in beta, users were signing up organically, and the engagement metrics were strong. Perkins was no longer asking investors to imagine a future product. She was showing them one that people were already using.
This is the pattern that distinguishes Canva's story from the typical Silicon Valley narrative. Most founder advice emphasizes raising money as early as possible — get a seed round, build the product, find product-market fit. Perkins did it in reverse. She found a version of product-market fit first (through Fusion Books and the Canva beta), then raised capital to accelerate what was already working.
Closing the round
In 2013, Canva raised a $3 million seed round led by Matrix Partners and InterWest Partners, with participation from 500 Startups and several angels including Bill Tai. The terms were favorable to the founders — a direct consequence of having leverage that comes from a working product with real traction rather than a concept.
Two years later, Felicis Ventures led a $15 million Series A. By then, Canva had over a million users and was growing rapidly through word of mouth. The freemium model — free for basic use, paid for premium templates and features — was already proving that users would convert. This was critical. Investors in design tools had long been skeptical that consumers would pay for software that competed with free alternatives. Canva's actual conversion data eliminated that objection.
What followed was a series of increasingly large rounds: $40 million from Sequoia Capital China and Blackbird Ventures in 2017, another $40 million from General Atlantic in 2018, and $85 million in 2019. By 2021, Canva raised $200 million at a $40 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world and the most valuable startup ever to come out of Australia.
What founders can learn
Canva's fundraising story offers three lessons that run counter to conventional startup wisdom.
The single most effective thing a founder can do to improve fundraising outcomes is to delay fundraising until they have something to show for it.
First, revenue before raising changes everything. When Perkins had only a pitch deck, she was rejected 100 times. When she had a profitable yearbook business and a beta product with real users, top-tier VCs competed to invest. The single most effective thing a founder can do to improve fundraising outcomes is to delay fundraising until they have something to show for it. Not every founder can afford to wait, but those who can often raise on dramatically better terms.
Second, persistence through rejection is not a motivational cliche — it is a literal prerequisite. Perkins was rejected more than 100 times over three years. Most founders give up after a dozen nos. The ones who build generational companies often have rejection counts that would seem absurd to anyone outside the startup world.
Third, international founders can break into Silicon Valley, but the path is different. Perkins did not relocate to San Francisco and network her way into warm introductions. She built a business in Perth, traveled to where investors gathered, and let her traction speak for itself. The connections that mattered — Bill Tai, Lars Rasmussen — came through industry events, not Y Combinator dinners. For founders outside the Valley, this is the more realistic playbook: build something undeniable, then find the right rooms to be in.