The promise of Canva’s eventual IPO has long been one of the more animating prospects in the Australian tech ecosystem: a generational liquidity event that would mint a new cohort of well-resourced operators, who would then fund and build the next wave of companies.
But it is also making it easier for some of the company’s most influential early executives to leave, just as Canva pushes through its most consequential product reinvention to date.
Thirteen years after it was founded, Canva is yet to list. But in the meantime, the company has been unusually disciplined about manufacturing liquidity for its staff, running a series of secondary tender offers — including a USD1.5 billion ($2.1 billion) round in April 2024 — that have allowed many of the executives most associated with its rise to take meaningful chips off the table well before any public market debut.
The company’s most recent employee secondary closed in August 2025, and no employee secondaries have opened since. A Canva spokesperson said there had been recent investor-to-investor transactions at Canva’s USD42 billion valuation, driven by early funds approaching the end of their typical venture lifecycle. Canva matched buy-side and sell-side parties but otherwise did not participate in the trades.
