Sydney-based Canva, the design platform for non-designers, has today announced the close of a $60 million funding round, bringing its valuation to $6 billion, according to the company.

The startup has raised a total of more than $300 million, including this latest round of financing, from investors like Bond, General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital China, Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures .

Canva COO and co-founder Cliff Obrecht explained that the round was 10x oversubscribed with interest from angels and new VCs, but that the company resisted taking extra capital.

“At our stage, investors are looking to deploy $50 million+ in capital,” said Obrecht. “Even our existing investors were looking to deploy between $50 million and $100 million, but we said ‘Oh, gee, we really don’t want to be diluted that much because we have a lot of conviction in the business and we don’t need that much money.’ ”

He also said the company wanted to remain with existing investors — Blackbird and Sequoia Capital China led this round — because those investors bet on the company when it was in its infancy, founded by three people in an isolated part of the world with no technical chops.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Canva made a commitment to continue paying all of its contracted workers, but froze hiring. The company also made quick moves to shut down the office and move to remote work. However, Canva is one of the few companies that is getting a boost from the world moving to work from home.

The company has seen a 50% uptick in shared designs, and around a 25% increase in designs created each month. Overall, Canva is growing 100% year over year in both revenue and users, with 30 million monthly active users across 190 countries.

Canva was founded in 2012 with the mission of democratizing design tools. While many non-designers can navigate their way around Google Slides or PowerPoint, or maybe even crop an image, going more in-depth on a design project can be daunting, as the suite of tools provided to designers can be incredibly complex.

The company’s tools are meant to simplify the design process for folks who don’t work in the design department, whether it’s the sales team putting together sales materials, marketers working on content or other departments working on internal materials to send to the broader organization. The drag-and-drop interface gives folks a way to create something beautiful and impressive without having to learn Photoshop.

The product started out as a freemium product for individual consumers but eventually started offering enterprise products, as well as a video editing tool that comes complete with video templates, easy-to-use animation tools and a library of stock video, music, etc.

The company has also launched an educational platform called Canva for Education, which integrates with G Suite and Google Classroom to get students started on design early. Canva also offers a developer platform for startups that want to integrate with the company, which currently includes Dropbox, Google Drive, PhotoMosh and Instagram, among others.

Most recently, Canva partnered with FedEx Office to offer easy design-to-print products that let users pick up print designs from one of more than 2,000 locations in the U.S. as the Sydney-based company looks to secure a foothold in this market.

Canva plans on using the funding to grow the company, make a push into collaboration and continue making acquisitions.

On the heels of the funding, Canva is looking to hire — the company currently has 1,000+ employees, of which more than 40% are female. (Canva did not disclose the percentage of its workforce that are non-white.)

Obrecht says that one of the greatest challenges for the company and for leadership personally is the burden of not feeling like they’re doing enough to make the world a better place. He explained that the company has a number of initiatives focused on this core tenet, including free access to the platform for more than 50,000 nonprofit organizations, education initiatives, anti-discrimination policies within its TOS and more.

“But it just never really feels like enough,” said Obrecht. “You see what’s happening and it’s a bit of a shit show and it’s not aspirational at all. It doesn’t look like it’s getting fixed quickly by the adults who are in government. They’re not doing the right thing, and if they’re not, who will? So we really believe we should have a heavy part in trying our best to make sure the shit show doesn’t continue.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Canva raises million on a billion valuation

Embodying the tensions that cities across the world face as they wrestle with controlling a pandemic in dense, urban environments, Urban-X, the accelerator for technology startups focused on the problems cities face, has launched its eighth, fully remote, cohort.

While the accelerator program backed by the BMW-owned Mini Cooper automaker and the venture capital firm Urban Us is based in Brooklyn, it’s conducting its latest program virtually, with participating startups coming from Atlanta, Sydney, San Francisco, Boston, Burlington and Los Angeles, according to a statement.

“Long term, we are bullish on cities. I think that COVID and climate change share some things in common. If we think that COVID is disruptive, and not only a threat to economic livelihood but human life, climate change, is certainly a much larger threat,” said Micah Kotch, the managing director of Urban-X. “I think that cities have withstood pandemics previously. I think that we will be moving forward. The clear things that we need are really good political leadership. We need to heed science and to act quickly based on the best possible science and we need collective action. And that’s where I see a lot of overlap between COVID and climate.”

The latest batch of companies that Urban-X will work with includes:

• Adiona: a machine learning-based service to optimize hourly workforces in logistics and supply chain management 
• Aquagenuity: a company providing search information about water quality for consumers
• Climate Robotics: a manufacturer of robots that produce carbon-sequestering and soil-improving biochar
• Mobilyze: the developer of a data analytics service for electric vehicle charging station site optimization
• Resonant Link: the creator of a wireless charging service to power robots and electric vehicles
• Xtelligent: a company rethinking traffic signal technology

“Not everyone can afford to move out to the suburbs and not everyone wants to. Cities are going to continue to be the epicenters of creativity and innovation,” said Kotch. “While these last three-and-a-half to four months have been a real challenge, particularly here in the U.S., we are deep believers in the vibrancy and necessity of cities.”

Later-stage investors think that the Urban-X thesis can create viable businesses, with about 85% of the accelerator’s companies going on to raise additional rounds of funding. Some of the most successful companies (in terms of capital raised) include Bowery Farming, Starcity, Mark43, One Concern, Future Motion, Skycatch, Seamlessdocs, Revivn, BRCK and Rachio.

“Technology, investment and mentorship have the power to advance the low carbon, resilient and high density future we need for our cities,” said Shaun Abrahamson, Urban-X Investment Committee and managing partner at Urban Us. “We are thrilled to have this new group of founders join Urban-X to build creative solutions that tackle climate change and the biggest issues facing our cities.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cities are wrestling with a potential new exodus in the COVID-19 era, but Urban-X still believes in their future

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our short-form week-starter in which we go over the weekend, look to the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds and dig into what is stuck on our minds.

This morning, here’s what we talked about:

• Equity is on Twitter! You can follow us on @EquityPod
• The COVID-19 pandemic hit a new, worse milestone over the weekend. What is ahead for the global economy is not clear, but the horizon is not clear for startups big and small.
• Many tech firms in the U.S. took Juneteenth off, limiting recent news, and with WWDC starting today there’s going to be something akin to a Cupertino takeover for the next few days. If you don’t care about Apple, you can just take some time off.
• Stocks are heading up this morning, with tech shares testing new records.
• Mexico’s Heartbest raised a $2 million Series A to help develop plant-based dairy replacements, and San Francisco’s Acquire raised a $6.4 million Series A to help with its customer success service. Blue Horizon Ventures and Base10 led the rounds, respectively.
• And, finally, the Hey-Apple drama reaches WWDC today. Apple has signaled that no changes are coming, but the company is in water that feels fractionally hotter with each passing day. What Apple can do to repair relations with developers who are more than a little worried about the megacorp isn’t clear. But for startups, the final results of this scrap could really matter.

And that is that. Equity is back Friday with more. Have a great week!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Equity Monday: Heartbest and Acquire raise capital as tech turns to Apple’s WWDC

With more companies moving workers home, making sure your systems are up and running has become more important than ever. ServiceNow, which includes in its product catalog an IT Help Desk component, recognizes that help desks have been bombarded during the pandemic. To help stop configuration problems before they start, the company today acquired Sweagle, a configuration management startup based in Belgium.

The companies did not share the purchase price.

ServiceNow gets a couple of boosts in the deal. First of all, it gets the startup’s configuration management products, which it can incorporate into its own catalog, but it also gains the machine learning and DevOps knowledge of the company’s employees. (The company would not share the exact number of employees, but PitchBook pegs it at 15.)

RJ Jainendra, ServiceNow’s vice president and general manager of DevOps and IT Business Management, sees a company that has pioneered the IT configuration management automation space, and brings with it capabilities that can boost ServiceNow’s offerings. “With capabilities for configuration data management from Sweagle, we will empower DevOps teams to deliver application and infrastructure changes more rapidly while reducing risk,” Jainendra said in a statement.

ServiceNow claims that there can be as many as 50,000 different configuration elements in a single enterprise application. Sweagle has designed a configuration data management platform with machine learning underpinnings to help customers simplify and automate that complexity. Configuration errors can cause shutdowns, security issues and other serious problems for companies.

Sweagle was founded in 2017 and raised $4.05 million on a post-valuation of $11.88 million, according to PitchBook data.

The company is part of a growing pattern of early-stage startups being sucked up by larger companies during the pandemic, including VMware acquiring Ocatarine and Atlassian buying Halp in May and NetApp snagging Spot earlier this month.

This is the third acquisition for ServiceNow this year, all involving AI underpinnings. In January it bought Loom Systems and Passsage AI. The deal is expected to close in Q3 this year, according to ServiceNow.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | ServiceNow to acquire Belgian configuration management startup Sweagle

HashiCorp is well known in the developer community for offering a slew of open-source tools to help build and manage modern applications. Today the company announced a new cloud platform and plans to eventually offer managed versions of those tools, starting with Consul, a tool for connecting and securing services across platforms.

HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet says that the pandemic has accelerated demand for cloud infrastructure, and he sees a growing role for his company in helping to build cloud native applications. The company offers open-source and commercial versions of several popular tools, including Terraform, Consul, Vault and Packer, among others. These can run on premises or in the cloud, but McJannet says customers have been hankering for SaaS versions of these tools.

“Our customers have told us that it’s a huge challenge running a central shared service like Consul. It requires them to keep it up and running, and they have asked for something they can consume from us where we manage it for them,” McJannet told TechCrunch.

The company has been offering a managed version of Terraform for some time, but it has been quietly working on a cloud platform that could allow it to plug in each of the company’s products over time and offer managed services of all the products.

“What we are announcing today is what we call the HashiCorp Cloud Platform, and you can think of it as just a common chassis to allow us to run our products on any cloud. The first of those products that we’re making available is Consul on Amazon,” he said.

By offering the company’s products as a set of cloud services, it will lower the barrier to entry for customers who want to use their tooling, but don’t have the resources to run and manage on their own. That could potentially increase the company revenue over time. As McJannet pointed out, it’s a lot like what MongDB did with its managed Atlas database service, but for a wider set of products.

Last Fall, HashiCorp announced a $175 million investment on an impressive $5 billion valuation. It has 1,000 employees and is continuing to hire as demand for its product continues through the pandemic. McJannet was not discussing specific customer numbers, but said the customer count has doubled over the last year. As it builds out the new cloud services, and introduces more customers to its products, there’s a good chance that number will keep growing.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | HashiCorp to offer managed versions of its developer tools starting with Consul