Fil-Aussie Canva CEO is Australia’s Youngest Billionaire

At 32 years old, Melanie Perkins is not only the youngest billionaire in Australian but is also the country’s third-richest woman.

The half-Filipino, half-Australian, is the genius behind Canva, a graphic design and publishing tool. Known for being user-friendly and accessible, Canva’s worth is believed to be at $2.5 billion after adding in another $60 million to its valuation. It’s new valuation now totals $6 billion.

Canva’s value surged at the time of the pandemic when working online has become the new normal. It had released several new features when the rest of the world was in lockdown. Among these features is the video call backgrounds that employees on a work-from-home setup can use.

Australia's youngest billionaire

Photo Credit: Facebook/Melanie Perkins

Together with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, Melanie started the graphic design solution in 2014. Her most significant break came after getting Silicon Valley’s nod of approval.

With $1.32 billion, she first landed at the 82nd spot of Australian’s richest 250 list.

Innate entrepreneurial spirit

She shared that the most crucial thing in building a business is to work on a problem that you want to solve.

Melanie said that once you find a problem you want to solve passionately, there’s going to be so many barriers—every single barrier you can possibly imagine.

“I think that once you get a crystal clear picture of the problem you want to solve, that’s sort of step one,” she added.

Australia's youngest billionaire

Photo Credit: Facebook/Melanie Perkins

As for the Canva CEO, she wanted to find an easier way of creating professional and quality graphic designs that one can do online regardless of his or her level of experience.

To date, Canva has over 30 million users per month, creating designs and collaborating on presentations, marketing materials, social media content, videos, and more. Every month, over 15 million people and 50,000 schools were using Canva.

Since its launch, over 3 billion designs have been created at a whopping 80 designs per second.

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