Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Census, a startup that helps businesses sync their customer data from their data warehouses to their various business tools like Salesforce and Marketo, today announced that it has raised a $16 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital. Other participants in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, which led the company’s $4.3 million seed round last year, as well as several notable angles, including Figma CEO Dylan Field, GitHub CTO Jason Warner, Notion COO Akshay Kothari and Rippling CEO Parker Conrad.

The company is part of a new crop of startups that are building on top of data warehouses. The general idea behind Census is to help businesses operationalize the data in their data warehouses, which was traditionally only used for analytics and reporting use cases. But as businesses realized that all the data they needed was already available in their data warehouses and that they could use that as a single source of truth without having to build additional integrations, an ecosystem of companies that operationalize this data started to form.

The company argues that the modern data stack, with data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake at its core, offers all of the tools a business needs to extract and transform data (like Fivetran, dbt) and then visualize it (think Looker).

Tools like Census then essentially function as a new layer that sits between the data warehouse and the business tools that can help companies extract value from this data. With that, users can easily sync their product data into a marketing tool like Marketo or a CRM service like Salesforce, for example.

Image Credits: Census

“Three years ago, we were the first to ask, ‘Why are we relying on a clumsy tangle of wires connecting every app when everything we need is already in the warehouse? What if you could leverage your data team to drive operations?’ When the data warehouse is connected to the rest of the business, the possibilities are limitless,” Census explains in today’s announcement. “When we launched, our focus was enabling product-led companies like Figma, Canva, and Notion to drive better marketing, sales, and customer success. Along the way, our customers have pulled Census into more and more scenarios, like auto-prioritizing support tickets in Zendesk, automating invoices in Netsuite, or even integrating with HR systems.“

Census already integrates with dozens of different services and data tools and its customers include the likes of Clearbit, Figma, Fivetran, LogDNA, Loom and Notion.

Looking ahead, Census plans to use the new funding to launch new features like deeper data validation and a visual query experience. In addition, it also plans to launch code-based orchestration to make Census workflows versionable and make it easier to integrate them into an enterprise orchestration system.

Sydney-based Canva, the design platform for non-designers, has today announced the close of a $60 million funding round, bringing its valuation to $6 billion, according to the company.

The startup has raised a total of more than $300 million, including this latest round of financing, from investors like Bond, General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital China, Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures .

Canva COO and co-founder Cliff Obrecht explained that the round was 10x oversubscribed with interest from angels and new VCs, but that the company resisted taking extra capital.

“At our stage, investors are looking to deploy $50 million+ in capital,” said Obrecht. “Even our existing investors were looking to deploy between $50 million and $100 million, but we said ‘Oh, gee, we really don’t want to be diluted that much because we have a lot of conviction in the business and we don’t need that much money.’ ”

He also said the company wanted to remain with existing investors — Blackbird and Sequoia Capital China led this round — because those investors bet on the company when it was in its infancy, founded by three people in an isolated part of the world with no technical chops.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Canva made a commitment to continue paying all of its contracted workers, but froze hiring. The company also made quick moves to shut down the office and move to remote work. However, Canva is one of the few companies that is getting a boost from the world moving to work from home.

The company has seen a 50% uptick in shared designs, and around a 25% increase in designs created each month. Overall, Canva is growing 100% year over year in both revenue and users, with 30 million monthly active users across 190 countries.

Canva was founded in 2012 with the mission of democratizing design tools. While many non-designers can navigate their way around Google Slides or PowerPoint, or maybe even crop an image, going more in-depth on a design project can be daunting, as the suite of tools provided to designers can be incredibly complex.

The company’s tools are meant to simplify the design process for folks who don’t work in the design department, whether it’s the sales team putting together sales materials, marketers working on content or other departments working on internal materials to send to the broader organization. The drag-and-drop interface gives folks a way to create something beautiful and impressive without having to learn Photoshop.

The product started out as a freemium product for individual consumers but eventually started offering enterprise products, as well as a video editing tool that comes complete with video templates, easy-to-use animation tools and a library of stock video, music, etc.

The company has also launched an educational platform called Canva for Education, which integrates with G Suite and Google Classroom to get students started on design early. Canva also offers a developer platform for startups that want to integrate with the company, which currently includes Dropbox, Google Drive, PhotoMosh and Instagram, among others.

Most recently, Canva partnered with FedEx Office to offer easy design-to-print products that let users pick up print designs from one of more than 2,000 locations in the U.S. as the Sydney-based company looks to secure a foothold in this market.

Canva plans on using the funding to grow the company, make a push into collaboration and continue making acquisitions.

On the heels of the funding, Canva is looking to hire — the company currently has 1,000+ employees, of which more than 40% are female. (Canva did not disclose the percentage of its workforce that are non-white.)

Obrecht says that one of the greatest challenges for the company and for leadership personally is the burden of not feeling like they’re doing enough to make the world a better place. He explained that the company has a number of initiatives focused on this core tenet, including free access to the platform for more than 50,000 nonprofit organizations, education initiatives, anti-discrimination policies within its TOS and more.

“But it just never really feels like enough,” said Obrecht. “You see what’s happening and it’s a bit of a shit show and it’s not aspirational at all. It doesn’t look like it’s getting fixed quickly by the adults who are in government. They’re not doing the right thing, and if they’re not, who will? So we really believe we should have a heavy part in trying our best to make sure the shit show doesn’t continue.”

Canva, the design platform for non-designers, has recently inked a partnership with FedEx Office to help businesses reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic with a design-to-print integration.

Canva declined to disclose the financial terms of the partnership.

With the new partnership, Canva and FedEx customers alike will be able to use Canva’s extensive libraries of templates, images and illustrations to design print materials for their businesses, like disposable restaurant menus, new hours of operation, information around new safety policies in the wake of the pandemic and more.

These customers can send their designs directly to FedEx for printing and pick up from over 2,000 FedEx Office locations across the U.S.

Canva’s target demographic is not hardcore, professional designers but rather non-designers, with a mission of democratizing design across professional organizations and more broadly to amateur designers.

As of October 2019, the Australia-based company was valued at $3.2 billion. At the time, Canva introduced enterprise collaboration software that allows sales teams, HR teams and other non-design teams to build out their own decks and materials with a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Since, Canva has complemented its design product with video editing software, as well.

The partnership with FedEx Office marks a big push into the U.S. market, with increased brand awareness and distribution via the established print and shipping giant.

Pricing around FedEx Office printing of Canva designs remains the same as FedEx’s usual pricing structure, but through August 31 FedEx is offering a 25% discount on orders of more than $50.

Canva, the design company with nearly $250 million in funding, has today announced a variety of new features, including a video editing tool.

The company has also announced Canva Apps, which allows developers and customers alike to build on top of Canva. Thus far, Dropbox, Google Drive, PhotoMosh and Instagram are already in the Canva Apps suite, with a total of 30 apps available at launch.

The video editing tool allows for easy editing with no previous experience required, and also offers video templates, access to a stock content library with videos, music, etc. and easy-to-use animation tools.

Meanwhile, Canva is taking the approach of winning customers when they’re young, with the launch of Canva for Education. It’s a totally free product that has launched in beta with Australian schools, integrating with GSuite and Google Classroom to allow students to build out projects, and teachers to mark them up and review them.

Canva has also announced the launch of Canva for Desktop.

As design becomes more important to the way every organization functions and operates, one of the only barriers to the growth of the category is the pace at which new designers can emerge and enter the workforce.

Canva has positioned itself as the non-designer’s design tool, making it easy to create something beautiful with little to no design experience. The launch of the video editing tool and Canva for Education strengthen that stance, not only creating more users for the platform itself but fostering an environment for the maturation of new designers to join the ecosystem as a whole.

Alongside the announcement, Canva CEO Melanie Perkins has announced that Canva will join the 1% pledge, dedicating 1% of equity, profit, time and resources to making the world a better place.

Here’s what she had to say about it, in a prepared statement:

Companies have a huge role to play in helping to shape the world we live in and we feel like the 1% Pledge is an incredible program which will help us to use our company’s time, resources, product and equity to do just that. We believe the old adage ‘do no evil’ is no longer enough today and hope to live up to our value to ‘Be a Force for Good’.

Interestingly, Canva’s position at the top of the design funnel hasn’t slowed growth. Indeed, Canva recently launched Canva for Enterprise to let all the folks in the organization outside of the design department step up to bat and create their own decks, presentations, materials, etc., all within the parameter’s of the design system and brand aesthetic.

A billion designs have been created on Canva in 2019, with 2 billion designs created since the launch of the platform.

Ten years ago, the vast majority of designers were working in Adobe Photoshop, a powerful tool with fine-tuned controls for almost every kind of image manipulation one could imagine. But it was a tool built for an analog world focused on photos, flyers and print magazines; there were no collaborative features, and much more importantly for designers, there were no other options.

Since then, a handful of major players have stepped up to dominate the market alongside the behemoth, including InVision, Sketch, Figma and Canva.

And with the shift in the way designers fit into organizations and the way design fits into business overall, the design ecosystem is following the same path blazed by enterprise SaaS companies in recent years. Undoubtedly, investors are ready to place their bets in design.

But the question still remains over whether the design industry will follow in the footprints of the sales stack — with Salesforce reigning as king and hundreds of much smaller startup subjects serving at its pleasure — or if it will go the way of the marketing stack, where a lively ecosystem of smaller niche players exist under the umbrella of a handful of major, general-use players.

“Deca-billion-dollar SaaS categories aren’t born everyday,” said InVision CEO Clark Valberg . “From my perspective, the majority of investors are still trying to understand the ontology of the space, while remaining sufficiently aware of its current and future economic impact so as to eagerly secure their foothold. The space is new and important enough to create gold-rush momentum, but evolving at a speed to produce the illusion of micro-categorization, which, in many cases, will ultimately fail to pass the test of time and avoid inevitable consolidation.”

I spoke to several notable players in the design space — Sketch CEO Pieter Omvlee, InVision CEO Clark Valberg, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Adobe Product Director Mark Webster, InVision VP and former VP of Design at Twitter Mike Davidson, Sequoia General Partner Andrew Reed and FirstMark Capital General Partner Amish Jani — and asked them what the fierce competition means for the future of the ecosystem.

But let’s first back up.

Past

Sketch launched in 2010, offering the first viable alternative to Photoshop. Made for design and not photo-editing with a specific focus on UI and UX design, Sketch arrived just as the app craze was picking up serious steam.

A year later, InVision landed in the mix. Rather than focus on the tools designers used, it concentrated on the evolution of design within organizations. With designers consolidating from many specialties to overarching positions like product and user experience designers, and with the screen becoming a primary point of contact between every company and its customers, InVision filled the gap of collaboration with its focus on prototypes.

If designs could look and feel like the real thing — without the resources spent by engineering — to allow executives, product leads and others to weigh in, the time it takes to bring a product to market could be cut significantly, and InVision capitalized on this new efficiency.

In 2012, came Canva, a product that focused primarily on non-designers and folks who need to ‘design’ without all the bells and whistles professionals use. The thesis: no matter which department you work in, you still need design, whether it’s for an internal meeting, an external sales deck, or simply a side project you’re working on in your personal time. Canva, like many tech firms these days, has taken its top-of-funnel approach to the enterprise, giving businesses an opportunity to unify non-designers within the org for their various decks and materials.

In 2016, the industry felt two more big shifts. In the first, Adobe woke up, realized it still had to compete and launched Adobe XD, which allowed designers to collaborate amongst themselves and within the organization, not unlike InVision, complete with prototyping capabilities. The second shift was the introduction of a little company called Figma.

Where Sketch innovated on price, focus and usability, and where InVision helped evolve design’s position within an organization, Figma changed the game with straight-up technology. If Github is Google Drive, Figma is Google Docs. Not only does Figma allow organizations to store and share design files, it actually allows multiple designers to work in the same file at one time. Oh, and it’s all on the web.

In 2018, InVision started to move up stream with the launch of Studio, a design tool meant to take on the likes of Adobe and Sketch and, yes, Figma.

Present

When it comes to design tools in 2019, we have an embarrassment of riches, but the success of these players can’t be fully credited to the products themselves.

A shift in the way businesses think about digital presence has been underway since the early 2000s. In the not-too-distant past, not every company had a website and many that did offered a very basic site without much utility.

In short, designers were needed and valued at digital-first businesses and consumer-facing companies moving toward e-commerce, but very early-stage digital products, or incumbents in traditional industries had a free pass to focus on issues other than design. Remember the original MySpace? Here’s what Amazon looked like when it launched.

In the not-too-distant past, the aesthetic bar for internet design was very, very low. That’s no longer the case.

Canva, the Australian-based design tool maker, has today announced that it has raised an additional $85 million to bring its valuation to $3.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion in May.

Investors in the company include Mary Meeker’s Bond, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Blackbird and Sequoia China.

Alongside the new funding and valuation, Canva is also making its foray into enterprise with the launch of Canva for Enterprise.

Thus far, Canva has offered users a lightweight tool set for creating marketing and sales decks, social media materials, and other design products mostly unrelated to product design. The idea here is that, outside of product designers, the rest of the organization is often left behind with regards to keeping brand parity in the materials they use.

Canva is available for free for individual users, but the company has addressed the growing need within professional organizations to keep brand parity through Canva Pro, a premium version of the product available for $12.95/month.

The company is now extending service to organizations with the launch of Canva for Enterprise. The new product will not only offer a brand kit (Canva’s parlance for Design System), but will also offer marketing and sales templates, locked approval-based workflows, and even hide Canva’s massive design library within the organization so employees only have access to their approved brand assets, fonts, colors, etc.

Canva for Enterprise also adds another layer of organization, allowing collaboration across comments, a dashboard to manage teams and assign roles, and team folders.

“We’re in a fortunate place because the market has been disaggregated,” said Canva CEO and founder Melanie Perkins. “The way we think about the pain point consumers have is that people are being inconsistent with the brand, and there are huge inefficiencies within the organization, which is why people have been literally asking us to build this exact product.”

More than 20 million users sign into Canva each month across 190 countries, with 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies using the product, according to the company.

Perkins says that the ultimate goal is to have every person in the world with access to the internet and a design need to be on the platform.