Graphic design start-up Canva is now the largest privately-owned company in Australia after raising $87 million in its latest round of funding, giving it a paper value of $8.77 billion.

The valuation sees CEO Melanie Perkins, co-founded the company with her fiance Cliff Obrecht, become Australia’s third-richest woman, with the couple’s 30% stake wealth estimated to be in excess of $2.5 billion.

The funding caps off a successful few months for Canva, which continues to see significant growth in its userbase despite the disruption caused by COVID-19.

However, co-founder Cliff Obrecht tells Brooke Corte he wasn’t sure whether Canva would survive the coronavirus crisis.

“Moving into COVID, we were initially quite cautious because we thought that the business would be hit quite hard with lots of small and medium business really struggling, and we thought that would impact business metrics,” Mr Obrecht said.

But as the crisis unfolded, and as businesses of all shapes and sizes began to focus their attention to their digital offerings, Canva’s userbase began creating designs at a feverish pace.

“Small businesses were pivoting and needed to communicate to their customers that they were changing the way they do things, restaurants were moving to deliveries, and then a lot of large were using Canva extensively to communicate with their teams and create marketing material for social media,

“We really hit the mark through this period and saw growth,”

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