Melanie Perkins Net Worth

What is Melanie Perkins's Net Worth?

Melanie Perkins is an Australian tech entrepreneur who has a net worth of $6 billion. Melanie Perkins earned her fortune as the co-founder and CEO of the software company Canva. Canva offers accessible graphic design tools for a wide range of personal and professional uses, including presentations, promotional merchandise, and websites. Thanks to Canva, Perkins became one of the youngest female CEOs of a tech startup valued at over $1 billion. By 2021, the company's valuation surged to $40 billion. It has since retreated somewhat. Today, she is one of the richest people in Australia and one of the richest women in the world.

Early Life and Education

Melanie Perkins was born in 1987 in Perth, Australia to a teacher and an engineer. She has Malaysian, Filipino, and Sri Lankan ancestry through her father. As a youth, Perkins attended Sacred Heart College in the Perth suburb of Sorrento. During this time, she dreamt of becoming a professional figure skater and woke up early in the mornings to train. By the time she was 14 years old, Perkins had started her first business, which involved selling handmade scarves throughout Perth. After graduating from high school, she attended the University of Western Australia, where she majored in communications, psychology, and commerce. Meanwhile, Perkins also worked as a private tutor for students learning graphic design. She ultimately dropped out of college to pursue her business career.

Fusion Books

Perkins launched her first major business, Fusion Books, in 2007. Co-founded by Cliff Obrecht, the company offered software that allowed students to design their own school yearbooks in an intuitive, easy-to-learn way. Over a span of five years, Fusion Books became the largest yearbook company in Australia and also became popular in France and New Zealand.

(Photo by Nina Franova/Getty Images for SXSW Sydney)

Canva

On New Year's Day, 2013, Perkins co-founded the software company Canva with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams. Based on the idea that graphic design should be made more accessible to people, the company provides a platform that lets users create graphics for a wide range of uses, including social media, presentations, promotional merchandise, and websites. In addition to its templates and myriad graphic design tools, Canva offers functionalities for editing photos and videos. Operating on a freemium model, the service had over 750,000 users in its first year.

In early 2018, after raising $40 million, Canva was valued at $1 billion, making Perkins one of the youngest female CEOs of a tech startup with that valuation. The company's value kept increasing over the subsequent years as it raised hundreds of millions of dollars more. By the last quarter of 2021, Canva peaked at a valuation of $40 billion. Over the years, it has acquired such services as Pixabay, Pexels, Smartmockups, Flourish, and Serif. Canva is available in over 100 languages and has upwards of 220 million users worldwide.

Personal Life

In 2019, Perkins got engaged to her business partner Cliff Obrecht, who proposed to her with a $30 ring while on vacation in Turkey. The couple later married on Rottnest Island in Australia in early 2021. That year, they joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's the Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of their fortune to philanthropic causes.  

Among her hobbies, Perkins likes to kite surf. She first took up the sport when she learned that it was an ideal way to network with prominent venture capitalists. Notably, Perkins did regular kitesurfing outings with investor Bill Tai, who played an integral role in the advancement of her career. Perkins also likes to travel, claiming that a trip she took to India was life-changing for her.

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