Australia’s fifth richest woman has started giving away her fortune

Australia’s fifth richest woman, who first made money selling spray-on tattoos at a Perth fair, now leads a multinational tech powerhouse worth more than Woodside, Rio Tinto and Woolworths. Melanie Perkins’ (pictured) DIY graphic design platform, Canva, is now valued at more than $48.7billion following several secondary share sales, an increase from its previous valuation of $39billion in April, making it one of Australia’s most valuable companies.

Perkins, 37, and her co-founder and husband, Cliff Obrecht, 38, each own about 18 per cent of the company, which is now poised for a much-anticipated public listing. ‘It’s been an extraordinary year for all of us at Canva as we celebrate remarkable growth and increasing demand for our business,’ Mr Obrecht said. ‘We’re really excited to be empowering more than 200 million people in 190 countries with the simplicity, access, and power of our product. While we’re incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made, we’re just getting started and we’re looking forward to a whole lot more to come.’

Canva’s paying customers increased 38 per cent year-on-year to 22 million while overall active users topped 200 million for the first time, following the introduction of generative AI features. After humble beginnings, the ultra-ambitious Perkins has come to be regarded in tech circles as a friendly but ‘intense’ visionary who is obsessed that everyone uses her website. ‘We want every single person on the planet to use Canva,’ she previously said. She also shared with staff that the company aims to become one of the world’s most valuable – yet they don’t intend to hold on to all that wealth.

In 2022, they signed up to Bill Gates’ the Giving Pledge, committing to giving away the majority of their fortune to charitable causes during their lifetimes. ‘It has never felt like our money, we’ve always felt that we’re purely custodians of it. As we’ve previously shared, it’s long been our intention to give the wealth away, and we’ve been thinking long and hard about the best way to start that journey,’ Perkins wrote in 2021. ‘We have this wildly optimistic belief that there is enough money, goodwill, and good intentions in the world to solve most of the world’s problems, and we want to spend our lifetime working towards that.’

A recent filing with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission revealed that between July 2022 and December 2023, the Canva founders, including Cameron Adams, contributed $38.9million in cash to the Canva Foundation, along with an additional $607,416 in non-cash donations. The Canva Foundation supports a range of initiatives across Australia, India, Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Philippines, Ukraine, the United States, and various African nations. Notable contributions include $700,000 in disaster relief for earthquake recovery efforts in Turkey, Morocco, and Afghanistan, as well as support following the floods in Libya and wildfire devastation in Hawaii.

The Foundation has also committed an initial $7.4 million to an educational pilot program focused on improving literacy and numeracy skills in Southern Africa and India. Ms Perkins and Mr Obrecht met while studying at the University of Western Australia, and early on, they made money together selling spray-on tattoos at local fairs. Before meeting Mr Obrecht, Ms Perkins was a dedicated figure skater, training daily at 4.30am, before attending Sacred Heart College. After school, she would sell handmade scarves at markets and local shops.

While studying commerce at university, she earned extra income tutoring other students in graphic design. Her idea for a graphic design business took shape in 2005, leading her to start a school yearbook business, Fusion, from her mother’s living room. ‘My boyfriend became my co-founder, and we started in my mum’s living room,’ she said. The couple started with a bank loan and a tax rebate of $5,000, which they used to advertise online and send sample yearbooks to school. In 2013, they launched Canva, purchasing the URL canva.com for $2,500. The following year, they relocated to Sydney to expand the business.

Ms Perkins faced numerous rejections from investors – being turned down 100 times- before she honed her pitch and secured $1.5million in funding, including support from Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen. In an effort to connect with Silicon Valley’s tech leaders, Ms Perkins even learned kiteboarding. However, while sailing alone in the Caribbean channel between Richard Branson’s Necker and Moskito Islands, she became stranded for hours and had to be rescued.

One of the couple’s early business strategies was persuading photographers to accept a 25-cent royalty per sale for images in Canva’s library, rather than the one-time fee offered by platforms like Getty. Mr Obrecht convinced them that as Canva grew, their photos could be sold thousands or even millions of times, leading to much higher overall earnings. In 2019 Mr Obrecht proposed to her on a trip to Turkey, with an engagement ring worth just $30. ‘We live pretty modestly, and we don’t really see the need to just accrue wealth. The priority for the company is education, because we really feel educating underprivileged people gives them the opportunity to break the cycle,’ he said.

The couple married on Rottnest Island in January 2021 but still reside in Sydney, living in a modest terrace home in Surry Hills, purchased for $1.7 million, the median house price for the inner-city suburb. ‘Mel and I are committed to giving away all our money to make the world a better place,’ he told The Australian. ‘I think with running such a large company with such a significant valuation now, it’s an obligation on us to use that to be a force for good and make the world a better place, rather than just hoard [expletive].’

Want more stories like this from the Daily Mail? Hit the follow button above for more of the news you need.