Canva Hires Ex-Zoom CFO but Hedges on IPO Timing

Design software firm Canva has hired Zoom Video’s longtime finance chief, Kelly Steckelberg, as its chief financial officer, filling a 10-month vacancy in which the company prioritized picking an executive who had taken a fast-growing company public.

The hiring is important for Canva’s ability to go public, although its co-founder in an interview said the company preferred to stay private in the near term to make product investments public investors might scrutinize, like those in artificial intelligence and corporate sales.

Canva, recently valued at $32 billion in sales of shares by investors, is a closely watched initial public offering candidate at a time when tech industry investors have endured their third straight year of sparse listings. Large private software firms like Stripe, Databricks and Rippling have put off IPOs even as tech stocks have risen, mainly because they have succeeded in raising money privately to let employees and investors cash out a portion of their shares.

Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s chief operating officer and one-half of its husband-and-wife leadership team which also include CEO Melanie Perkins, said the company was in “no massive rush” to go public. “We have large big swings to make from the product and go-to-market perspective,” he said. “It takes a lot more effort to educate public markets on big bets than it does in the private markets.”

Still, he said it’s “inevitable” the company will eventually go public. He said the company chose Steckelberg in part because she had taken Zoom public in 2019. Steckelberg, based in Austin, Texas, had a seven-year run as Zoom’s CFO. She announced her resignation in August and stayed on through October, according to a securities filing. At Canva, she succeeds former CFO Damien Singh, who left the company in February. (See Canva’s org chart.)

Canva offers a suite of design, marketing and video creation tools, and has plugged AI tools into many of its products. The company recently told investors in a memo its annualized revenue grew to $2.55 billion in the third quarter, up by about 44% from the same period last year. That’s a slowdown from growth of 51% during the same period the previous year.

Still, annualized sales—defined as a month of sales multiplied by 12—have grown more than sixfold since 2020. The 11-year-old company, which has about 5,000 employees, also said it would generate cash this year for the second year in a row.

Only about 10% of Canva’s users pay for the product. The company, based in Sydney, Australia, said it had about 200 million monthly active users at the end of September, and more than 22 million people pay for it. Obrecht said it now has about 220 million monthly active users.

An IPO would further test Canva’s balancing act of catering to long-time users while expanding sales. Investors expect corporate sales to help power its future growth. “The pace at which we added enterprise annualized revenue tripled from the same quarter last year,” the company told investors, without disclosing enterprise sales growth.The company also had to walk back a pricing increase for early corporate customers, from $3 per license per month to $10 per license per month, after encountering a backlash earlier this year. It kept the price increase for new customers.