Figma

Canva

Figma

Figma uses a freemium model. Individual designers can use Figma for free with up to three active projects.

Teams pay per editor per month — $15/month for the Professional tier and $75/month for the Organization tier. Viewers are always free, which was revolutionary.

In Sketch, if a developer wanted to inspect a design, they needed a license. In Figma, you just send them a link.

This "free viewers, paid editors" model was genius because it turned every designer into a distribution channel. A designer joins a company, uses Figma, invites 50 engineers and PMs to view files, and suddenly the whole company is embedded in the Figma ecosystem.

When decision-makers see everyone already using it, upgrading to a paid team plan is automatic.

Revenue grew from essentially nothing in 2018 to over $600 million ARR by 2023. The company was profitable by mid-2022 — unusual for a venture-backed startup.

They achieved this without a massive enterprise sales team. The product spread bottom-up through organizations, designer by designer, team by team.

Canva

Canva runs on a freemium model with three tiers. The free plan gives users access to over 250,000 templates, thousands of photos and graphics, and the core drag-and-drop editor.

Canva Pro costs $15/month and adds premium templates, brand kits, background remover, and a content planner. Canva for Teams costs $10/person/month and adds collaboration features, brand controls, and workflow management.

The conversion funnel is elegant. Free users hit natural paywalls — they want to resize a design for a different platform, or remove a background, or use that one premium template.

These aren't arbitrary limitations. They're genuinely useful features that people pay for once they're hooked on the product.

The enterprise play is where the big money lives. Canva for Enterprise offers single sign-on, advanced brand controls, and custom templates for large organizations.

Companies like Zoom, HubSpot, and Salesforce use Canva Enterprise. Annual recurring revenue reportedly crossed $2.3 billion in 2024.

The company has been profitable since 2022.

Figma

Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University in 2012 after interning at Flipboard and winning a Thiel Fellowship — Peter Thiel's program that pays students $100,000 to leave college and start something. His co-founder Evan Wallace was a Brown classmate and graphics programming wizard who'd built impressive WebGL demos that proved browsers could handle complex visual work.

Their original idea wasn't even a design tool. Field initially wanted to build a flight search engine, then pivoted to drone photography, before landing on the insight that would define Figma: professional creative tools were stuck in the desktop era while everything else had moved to the cloud.

Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch — all required downloads, all worked on local files, and none of them let two people work on the same file simultaneously.

The technical challenge was enormous. Nobody believed you could build a high-performance vector graphics editor that ran entirely in a web browser.

Field and Wallace spent three years — 2012 to 2015 — just building the rendering engine before they had a product anyone could use. They basically had to invent new technology for browser-based graphics processing.

The first public beta launched in December 2015, and designers immediately noticed something no other tool offered: real-time multiplayer editing, like Google Docs but for design.

Canva

Melanie Perkins was 19 and studying at the University of Western Australia when she noticed her classmates struggling with design software. She was tutoring students on tools like InDesign and Photoshop, and the learning curve was absurd — these were professional tools being used by people who just wanted to make a school poster.

Her first venture was Fusion Books, a platform that let high school students design their own yearbooks using simple drag-and-drop tools. She launched it in 2007 with her boyfriend (now husband) Cliff Obrecht from her family's living room in Perth.

Fusion Books grew to become Australia's largest yearbook company and proved the core insight: regular people will create more if you make design tools simpler.

But Perkins had bigger ambitions. She wanted to do for all of design what Fusion Books did for yearbooks.

From 2010 to 2012, she flew to Silicon Valley repeatedly to pitch investors. She was rejected over 100 times.

A 22-year-old Australian woman with no tech experience pitching a design tool — VCs weren't exactly lining up. She finally met Bill Tai, a VC and kitesurfing enthusiast, at a conference and pitched him while kitesurfing.

He introduced her to Cameron Adams, a former Google engineer, who became the third co-founder and the technical backbone. Canva launched in August 2013.

Figma

Figma grew almost entirely through product-led growth — the product was so good and so easy to share that it spread virally through design teams. Every shared Figma link was marketing.

Every viewer who saw a design file in their browser without downloading anything was a conversion event.

The "free viewers" decision was the single most important growth lever. Traditional design tools charged per seat.

Figma said: only editors pay, everyone else is free. This removed all friction from collaboration and meant that for every paying designer, there might be 10-20 free viewers — all of whom experienced the product and became advocates.

Community was the second engine. Figma's open plugin system and free template marketplace created an ecosystem that locked in users.

Designers built their workflows around Figma-specific plugins, teams built design systems in Figma components, and switching costs climbed. By 2022, Figma had become the default — not just a design tool, but the operating system for product design.

Canva

Canva grew by making design a utility, not a skill. Their entire go-to-market was removing barriers.

No software to download — it runs in the browser. No design expertise needed — templates do the heavy lifting.

No cost to start — the free tier is genuinely useful.

Localization was a massive growth lever. Canva is available in over 100 languages across 190 countries.

They didn't just translate the interface — they created region-specific templates for local holidays, business customs, and cultural events. This gave them dominant market share in countries that Silicon Valley tools typically ignored.

Education was the Trojan horse. Canva for Education is completely free for K-12 teachers and students.

Over 70 million students use it. Every student who learns design on Canva is a future professional user.

It's the same playbook Microsoft used with Windows in schools during the 1990s — train the next generation on your tool and they'll use it for life.

The template marketplace created a flywheel. Designers create templates on Canva, users discover and customize them, Canva's library grows, more users join.

By 2024, the platform had over 5 billion designs created. That's not a tool — that's an ecosystem.

Figma

The Adobe acquisition saga was the biggest test. In September 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for $20 billion — the largest private software acquisition ever proposed.

Designers panicked. Would Adobe kill Figma's culture?

Bloat it with features? Integrate it into Creative Cloud and ruin the simplicity?

The deal fell apart in December 2023 when European regulators signaled they'd block it on antitrust grounds. Adobe walked away and paid a $1 billion breakup fee.

Figma was independent again — but now had to prove it could grow into a $20 billion company on its own.

Competition is intensifying. Canva is pushing into professional design.

Adobe is rebuilding its own collaborative tools. And newer entrants are using AI to generate designs automatically, potentially reducing the need for traditional design tools altogether.

Figma's challenge is staying ahead in a market it created while expanding into adjacent categories like presentations, whiteboarding, and development handoff.

Canva

The biggest challenge is moving upmarket without alienating the core user base. Canva was built for non-designers — small business owners, social media managers, teachers.

But to justify a $26 billion valuation, they need enterprise revenue. Enterprise clients want brand controls, workflow approvals, and advanced analytics.

Building those features without cluttering the simple interface that made Canva successful is a constant tension.

Adobe is the other challenge. Adobe Express is essentially Adobe's answer to Canva — a simplified design tool with access to Adobe's massive asset library.

Adobe has deeper technology, more professional credibility, and a sales force that already has relationships with every enterprise design team. So far, Canva's simplicity advantage has held, but Adobe is learning to be accessible faster than Canva is learning to be professional.

Figma

Figma Design — the core browser-based interface design tool with real-time multiplayer collaboration, component libraries, auto-layout, and prototyping. FigJam — a collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, diagramming, and planning that competes with Miro and Mural.

Dev Mode — a workspace specifically for developers to inspect designs, extract code snippets, and understand spacing and styling without bothering designers. Figma Slides — presentation software launched in 2024 that lets teams build slide decks using the same design tools and component libraries.

Community — a marketplace of free and paid design templates, plugins, and UI kits created by designers worldwide.

Canva

Canva Design Editor — the core drag-and-drop platform with 800,000+ templates for social media, presentations, posters, videos, websites, and basically anything visual. Magic Studio — their AI suite including Magic Design (generates designs from text prompts), Magic Edit (AI photo editing), Magic Write (AI text generation), and Magic Eraser.

Canva Docs — a visual-first document editor that bridges the gap between Google Docs and design software. Canva Presentations — presentation software that competes with PowerPoint and Google Slides by letting non-designers create visually stunning decks.

Canva Print — on-demand printing service that ships business cards, posters, t-shirts, and merch directly from your designs.

Figma

Index Ventures led the Series A and has been involved in nearly every round. Greylock Partners was an early backer.

Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital invested in growth rounds. Addition (Lee Fixel's fund) led the Series E that valued Figma at $10 billion.

The final private round in 2024, after the Adobe deal collapsed, reportedly valued Figma at $12.5 billion. Peter Thiel was indirectly connected through the Thiel Fellowship that funded Dylan Field's early journey.

Canva

Sequoia Capital China (now HongShan) led the Series A in 2013 — one of the earliest and most consequential bets. Felicis Ventures invested early.

Blackbird Ventures, an Australian VC, backed Canva from the start. Growth rounds brought in Dragoneer Investment Group, T.

Rowe Price, Franklin Templeton, and Bessemer Venture Partners. The 2021 round at $40 billion valuation was led by T.

Rowe Price, though the valuation was later marked down to $26 billion in 2024.