Melanie Perkins
Background
Melanie Perkins grew up in Perth, Western Australia, and attended the University of Western Australia, where she studied communications, psychology, and commerce. While tutoring university students in complex graphic design software, Perkins realized that tools like Adobe InDesign and Photoshop were absurdly complicated and unintuitive.
Role at Canva Pty Ltd
Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Canva Pty Ltd. In 2007, at just 19 years of age, Perkins founded Fusion Books with Cliff Obrecht from her mother's living room in Perth, building a profitable software platform that allowed Australian schools to design yearbooks online. Realizing that yearbook design was merely the first step toward democratizing all visual communication, Perkins spent years overcoming more than 100 venture capital rejections before launching Canva in 2013. Under Perkins' inspiring, visionary leadership, Canva expanded into an Australian tech giant generating over $2.3 billion in annual revenue at a $26.0 billion valuation, serving over 190 million monthly active users globally. Perkins is celebrated as one of the most successful female technology entrepreneurs in global history.