Canva Series F

Canva at $40 billion represents everything rational and irrational about late-cycle venture pricing, which makes it maddeningly difficult to dismiss outright. The fundamentals are undeniably strong—60 million users, actual revenue exceeding $1 billion ARR, and a freemium-to-paid conversion engine that would make Spotify weep with envy. T. Rowe Price and Franklin Templeton aren't exactly known for lighting money on fire; these are the institutional players who watched from the sidelines during the worst excesses of Web 1.0. But here's what keeps me up at night: September 2021 was the absolute zenith of the everything bubble, when SPACs roamed free and Tiger Global was putting term sheets in fortune cookies. A $40B valuation—roughly 40x revenue at the time—prices in not just dominance but complete obliteration of Adobe's consumer business, and I'm not sure the TAM supports that fever dream.

The timing smells like someone ringing a bell at the top of a mountain. Five months earlier, Canva raised at a $15B valuation. They nearly tripled their price tag in half a year during a period when my dog could've gotten funded for a blockchain-based treat dispenser. That kind of velocity isn't confidence—it's FOMO institutionalized. The crossover funds were desperate to get into anything with SaaS metrics and a consumer angle, bidding each other up like it was a Sotheby's auction for the last Basquiat. Sure, Canva earned the right to raise at a premium with their 150% net dollar retention and near-frictionless onboarding, but the macro backdrop here was screaming "Icarus, buddy, maybe level off a bit." We've seen this movie before: 1999, 2007, and now the 2021 vintage is aging about as well as expected.

What saves this from being a complete disaster is that Canva actually built something sticky and defensible, which is more than I can say for half the unicorns minted that year. The product genuinely democratized design in a way that Photoshop never could—my mom uses it to make church newsletters, and she still calls me to ask how to attach files to emails. The enterprise push is smart, the template marketplace creates a moat, and their international expansion in non-English markets shows strategic thinking beyond just growth-at-all-costs stupidity. Melanie Perkins and crew bootstrapped for years before taking VC money, which means they understand unit economics in a way that most founder-CEOs who went straight from Y Combinator to Series B never will. The existential question isn't whether Canva is a good business—it obviously is—but whether it's a $40B business in a world where interest rates aren't zero.

The exit math is where this gets properly uncomfortable. At $40B, you're talking about needing a $100B+ outcome for late-stage investors to see meaningful returns, which means either an IPO into a receptive public market or an acquisition by someone with more money than sense. Adobe could buy them, sure, but regulatory scrutiny on big tech M&A makes that a dice roll at best. A 2024 IPO at current valuation would've required market conditions that never materialized—suddenly that September 2021 round looks less like genius and more like catching a falling knife by the handle. The 6.6 rating reflects this contradiction: fundamentally sound company, historically questionable price, investors who should've known better but probably didn't care because LPs were throwing money at anything with a venture return profile. It's good, but it's good with an asterisk the size of Melanie Perkins' ambition.