Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins (born 1987) is an Australian entrepreneur who co-founded Canva in Perth in 2013 with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, after being rejected by more than a hundred investors. Her drag-and-drop design platform grew into one of the world’s most valuable private software companies, used by hundreds of millions of people who never trained as designers.

Magic Studio and the creator fund

In October 2023, at its Canva Create event, the company launched Magic Studio — a generative AI suite spanning text-to-image, Magic Write, Magic Edit, and automated design tools — which Perkins framed as AI for “the 99% of the world without complex design training.” Alongside it, Canva announced a $200 million, three-year Creator Compensation Program: contributors who opt in to letting their content train Canva’s proprietary models receive an upfront payment plus ongoing monthly royalties. Canva says it will never train on creator content without explicit permission.

The pairing was widely read as a deliberate contrast with AI companies that scraped creative work without consent — an argument that generative tools and creator compensation can coexist. Skeptics countered that $200 million spread across a global creator community is modest against Canva’s multibillion-dollar valuation, and that opt-in royalties do little for artists outside Canva’s ecosystem whose styles the broader AI wave has absorbed. Canva has since kept doubling down on AI, acquiring the generative-imagery company Leonardo.Ai in 2024 and folding AI deeper into its product.