Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins founded Canva in 2013 with the vision that design should be accessible to everyone, not just professionals with expensive Adobe software. Starting from Perth, Australia — about as far from Silicon Valley as you can get — she was rejected by over 100 investors before eventually raising funding and building Canva into one of the most valuable private companies in the world, with a $40B+ valuation.

Canva's genius was its simplicity. By offering drag-and-drop design tools, millions of templates, and a freemium model, Perkins turned everyone into a designer. Teachers making worksheets, small business owners creating social media posts, nonprofits building presentations — Canva gave them all professional-quality tools for free. The platform now has 170M+ monthly active users in 190+ countries.

Perkins was 19 when she started her first company, Fusion Books (an online yearbook design tool), which validated her thesis that design tools were too hard. She pitched Canva to investors for three years before getting funded, flew from Perth to Silicon Valley repeatedly, and was told 'no' more times than almost any successful founder. Her persistence and the quality of her product eventually won, and she has pledged to give away the majority of her wealth through the Canva Foundation.