Aussie VC's Canva bounty

As Canva founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams gird their loins for the biggest float in Australian history[[I use "Australian" here under advisement. Although Canva's founders are both Aussie, Canva has since 2022 been incorporated in Delaware. Among the advantages of Delaware incorporation are not having to reveal who owns shares in the company and enjoying the warm embrace of the US taxation system, which offers significant benefits for general partners in venture capital and private equity firms. Despite the ASX's claims of losing major tech company listings over its lack of dual class share structures, those GP tax lurks meant that Canva was always going to be IPO'd in the US and not Australia.]] – with Wall Street gossip tipping an IPO valuation well north of US$50 billion ($77 billion) – a phalanx of Australian venture capitalists and private investors await the greatest payday of their lives.

In 20 funding rounds between 2013 and 2024, the cloud-based design app producer raised US$2.5 billion in new money, with all but a tiny fraction of it being raised by US and local venture capital funds. Using US$50 billion as a valuation benchmark, those investors are set to realise returns ranging from as little as two times to as much as 200 times their original investments, depending on which funding round/s they participated in. Overall gains for the VC investors will be in the tens of billions of dollars – not a sentence I expect to write again in my lifetime. 

Naturally, US VC funds will take the lion's share of the Canva booty. By my analysis of the Canva data in Crunchbase, one of two VC industry scorekeepers, American VC funds raised US$2.3 billion (or 92 per cent) of Canva's new capital. In those funds, some of the general partners (or fund managers) will be personally taking home hundreds of millions of dollars from the IPO. None of the US VC general partners who backed Canva – of which there are more than 100 – need ever work again.