Canva, the visual content creation platform, recently announced a fresh $200 million funding round, bringing its total valuation to a staggering $40 billion and making it the fifth most valuable startup in the world. 

So what's worth $40 billion?

Canva offers design templates for users to create anything from social media posts and presentations to resumes and greeting cards. Founded in 2013 as a tool for entrepreneurs and small businesses, Canva is now used by more than 60 million monthly users, with half a million paying customers, including large enterprise customers such as Zoom, Salesforce, and PayPal. The company says it expects to hit $1 billion in revenue this year.

Opinions on Canva’s place in the design software world have been debated since its inception, and the schism between the Canva lovers and Canva haters continues today. 

However, from the beginning, Canva has never tried to replace advanced graphic design and vector graphics software. It is trying to democratize design by being the intermediary between easy-to-use software that creates more basic designs and software with steep learning curves that create beautiful, customized designs.

Small businesses a key user segment

While small business reviews dominate the Desktop Publishing category on G2, this trend is especially emphasized with Canva, as shown below. Within the Desktop Publishing software category, review counts for the small business segment starting in late 2018 are drastically larger than those for the medium and enterprise segments.

A similar trend can be seen in the G2 reviews for Canva—64% of the product’s nearly 3,000 reviews are from small business users, and small business reviews have consistently outnumbered mid-market and enterprise reviews over the last few years.

Canva’s founder, Melanie Jerkins, stated that their main focus with the new investment is growing, with plans to double their headcount. The company is also adding new product features web design and video editing. 

With these additional features and the added AI functionality from their recent acquisitions of Smartmockups and Kaleido, Canva keeps increasing its footprint in the design space.