Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins attended the University of Western Australia, where she taught students how to use highly complex, incredibly frustrating desktop design software. Her most critical background was forged when she dropped out to co-found Fusion Books, a school yearbook design platform run from her mother's living room. This hands-on experience in simplifying layout tools for non-designers provided the exact product-market blueprint required to engineer Canva's massive global success.

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, 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.