Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins is the world’s richest self-made female billionaire under 40

The Sydney -based start-up Canva, is valued at over $40 billion after a funding round last week, making this the fifth-largest start-up in the world. Perkins and her husband received $5.9 billion each according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The company started with a consumer-facing product to make design accessible for non-designers.

Launched in her mother’s living room in 2013, Perkin’s company at present sees more than 500 million users each month with creators ranging from individual creators to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies.

Despite their incredible wealth, the successful couple has committed to donating roughly 30% of their income with a vast amount going to their Canva Foundation Charity. They also announced a program with the non-profit GiveDirectly that will distribute $10 million to the poor in Southern Africa.

When asked the power-duo said, “It has felt strange when people refer to us as billionaires as it has never felt like our money,” Perkins said in a statement. “We’ve always felt that we’re purely custodians of it. It’s long been our intention to give the wealth away.”

“We want to build one of the world’s most valuable companies” – Hard work and reward come hand-in-hand with recognition. C-Suite member’s motto can be ‘Time is of the essence. Have you used Canva to save time instead of Adobe before?

At TechNET CxO we are a huge advocate of the incredibly intuitive graphic design software, Canva. We use it to allow our consultants to edit and post their ‘hot jobs’ onto Linkedin once a week. The sleek, professional result means one post can receive over 2,000 impressions in a day ensuring we reach the optimum level of candidates even through our marketing activities.