Melanie Perkins check: is there anything to find?

"Canva is profitable"

Yes, and this matters because most decacorns are cash furnaces. Canva has publicly and repeatedly stated that it has been profitable for years while continuing to grow, and that statement has stood unchallenged through funding rounds, large secondary share sales and plenty of press scrutiny. Investors who bought in those transactions did diligence on the books; nobody has come out disputing the profitability claim. Compare that with the loss disclosures that sank the WeWork listing and you can see why it's worth a stamp of its own.

"Perkins has adverse findings"

She doesn't. We looked where we always look: court records, regulator announcements, insolvency registers, and dated reporting from named outlets. Nothing attaches to Melanie Perkins personally: no charges, no enforcement actions, no misconduct findings, no substantive lawsuits. The story the record tells instead is straightforward: a teacher-turned-founder who started with a yearbook design tool, launched Canva in 2013 with her co-founders, and has signed the Giving Pledge to give away the bulk of her wealth. When our process finds nothing adverse on a person at this level of visibility, that absence is itself informative. Plenty of people have gone looking.

"The valuation is fake"

This one floats around about every private decacorn, so let's apply it here. Canva's headline valuation came from priced rounds, including one in 2021 that valued the company around $40 billion. "Fake" would mean nobody real ever paid those prices. The opposite is documented: Canva has run large secondary transactions where outside investors bought actual shares from employees and early holders, first at a markdown from the 2021 peak, later at higher marks again as the business grew.

Notice what that pattern is: real buyers, real money, prices that move both directions. That's an honestly marked private company. Fake valuations don't survive a down-round secondary; they avoid one.