Originally published at AvidXchange Newsroom.

AvidXchange recently joined Pledge 1% as part of its transition to become a public company listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. Pledge 1% is a global movement that encourages and empowers companies of all sizes and stages to donate 1% of their staff time, product, profit, or equity, or any combination of the four, to philanthropic endeavors of their choosing.

AvidXchange will join the more than 15,000 companies in 100 countries around the world that have used Pledge 1%’s framework to ignite over a billion dollars in new philanthropy this year alone.

“Joining Pledge 1% was a no-brainer for us when we were exploring ways to make a bigger impact outside our office walls following today’s milestone,” said Michael Praeger, CEO and Co-Founder of AvidXchange. “Corporate giving is a part of AvidXchange’s DNA and we look forward to leveraging this new commitment as an opportunity to give back to the communities where we work and live.”

“We are thrilled that AvidXchange has joined the Pledge 1% movement and that their commitment has already had such an immediate and meaningful impact,” said Amy Lesnick, Chief Executive of Pledge 1% “As an industry leader, AvidXchange is paving the way toward a future where social impact is part of every company’s culture, values, and business model.”

AvidXchange began its focus on giving-based initiatives in 2005 when the AvidXchange Foundation was founded in response to helping elementary school children impacted by Hurricane Katrina. The Foundation has continued to grow, taking on the mission of positively impacting the lives of youth in the communities where AvidXchange employees live and work.

To learn more about the AvidXchange Foundation, click here.

And to learn more about Pledge 1%, click here.

With such a strong response from the March 2021 Day of Shecurity event and the high demand for jobs in the cybersecurity field, Secure Diversity and the Lookout Foundation will host its next virtual Day of Shecurity on October 28 and 29, 2021, from 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. PDT (UTC – 7). For the first time, the conference will occur over two days to ease any concerns about devoting a whole day to conferencing and breaking it up for fewer hours over more dates.

Presented by Secure Diversity and The Lookout Foundation, Day of Shecurity is an initiative that launched a San Francisco-based lunch and learn in 2017 to provide career development and skills training to women interested in pursuing cybersecurity careers. The founding partners have since hosted five in-person conferences, including one international event – all free of charge to attendees. The inaugural virtual event, held on March 23, 2021, drew 1,711 registrations and 933 attendees from 53 countries. There were 85 unique presentations by 117 speakers between the main stage and session rooms. The majority of the presentations are available on the Day of Shecurity YouTube channel. This content does not include the number of technical and non-technical presentations provided by the sponsors in their expo booths.

Some highlights from the main stage included:

• Cybersecurity consultant and researcher Tomiko Evans turned poetry into a rap as her presentation asked the question, “Do we really take security seriously in this industry?”


• Hacker and security evangelist Alyssa Miller talked about the value of women in cybersecurity and made recommendations about how to be successful and achieve goals.


• Technology and cyber leader Jameeka Aaron from Auth0 discussed using emotional intelligence as the framework for cybersecurity culture.

The event was made possible – and provided training opportunities for participants –  by the 46 corporate and non-profit sponsors:

• Founding: Lookout and Secure Diversity


• VIP: Atlassian, Auth0, AWS, Boston Cybernetics Institute, Bridgecrew, CyberSN, Detectify, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, & Patreon


• Gold: Earnin, Gusto, Google, Highmark Health, Lyft, Oportun, Ramagine, Salesforce, Security Innovation, Segment, & Snap


• Silver: Flexport, Netflix, PagerDuty, Pinterest, Raytheon Technologies, Technium, Verkada, & Virsec


• Bronze: Chime, CircleCI, Open Raven, Sequoia Capital, Snyk, & Tinder


• In-Kind: CyberPreserve, CyberRisk Opportunities, NIFTWIT, INE, Innovation Women, Sightline Security, We Hack Purple, Wehmeyer & Associates, & Women’s Cyberjutsu

A Critical Need

A recent study found that women now comprise up to “30% [of cybersecurity workers]…up from 24% the year before. While men still make up a majority of the cybersecurity workforce, the growing percentage of women, and their positions within organizations, suggests cybersecurity provides a rewarding career path for women who choose to pursue it.”

Although numbers of women in cybersecurity rose according to the (ISC)² 2020 data, the pandemic resulted in an estimated 2.3 million women leaving the U.S. workforce between February 2020 and February 2021. American women are participating in the professional workforce at the lowest rates since the late 80’s.

The cybersecurity workforce demand has increased, evidenced by a 2020 report from The Tessian Opportunity that found:

• The cybersecurity workforce needs to grow by 145% to meet the current global demand.


• There are more than four million unfilled cybersecurity jobs.


• If the number of women working in cybersecurity rose to equal that of men, the industry’s economic footprint in the U.S. would increase by $30.4 billion.

To register, visit https://www.dayofshecurity.com/fall-2021-conference.

 

HELP US KEEP DAY OF SHECURITY FREE FOR ATTENDEES. BE A SPONSOR.

Sponsoring the Day of Shecurity Conference allows organizations to connect directly and support women interested and actively working in the cybersecurity field. Sponsors will be able to: recruit top security talent, expand the talent pipeline for the future, share products and services with the community, and align their brand with caring for diversity and inclusion.

This effort is completely funded by sponsorships, generosity, kindness, and the belief that collectively, we can make a difference.

If your organization wants to sponsor a future Day of Shecurity Conference, please fill out the form here.

Originally published at Australian Financial Review. Written by Michael Bailey.

The married couple behind Canva are worth $16.5 billion after the visual communication platform hit a $55 billion valuation on Wednesday, but Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht plan to give almost all of it away.

Canva, which employs 1200 people in Sydney’s Surry Hills and 800 more around the world, hit a $US40 billion ($55 billion) valuation, on par with iron ore giant Fortescue, after it raised $US200 million from selling new shares to investors.

As flagged by The Australian Financial Review’s Street Talk column in July, the raise – led by T. Rowe Price and joined by returning local investors Blackbird Ventures and AirTree Ventures among others – is more than double the $20 billion valuation which Canva announced after a $71 million equity sale in April.

 

Perkins and Obrecht, who married earlier this year after COVID-19 scuttled planned 2020 nuptials, revealed they continue to own 30 per cent of Canva – a paper wealth of $16.5 billion which would place them seventh on the Financial Review Rich List were it to be published today.

However, the couple have pledged to give the “vast majority” of their wealth away, starting with a $10 million southern African pilot program in partnership with GiveDirectly, in which cash will go straight to impoverished people in the form of mobile phone SIM cards.

“It has felt strange when people refer to us as ‘billionaires’ as it has never felt like our money, we’ve always felt that we’re purely custodians of it,” Perkins said.

“We have this wildly optimistic belief that there is enough money, goodwill, and good intentions in the world to solve most of the world’s problems, and we want to spend our lifetime working towards that.”

At a virtual press conference on Wednesday, Perkins explained why she and Obrecht would not wait until they cashed out on an exit from Canva to start giving.

 

“We believe Step 1 – that is, the creation of value by our team and community at Canva – fuels Step 2, which is doing good in the world,” she said.

Canva is already part of the ‘1% Pledge’ in which businesses commit a fraction of their profits and time to charitable causes, and Perkins said the “pride and motivation” she had seen it foster among staff and customers created a virtuous circle.

War chest to fuel growth soon

Obrecht also confirmed that a cash-out through a listing was not on the horizon.

He revealed that Canva had not spent any of the capital it had raised since 2015 – so did not need to go to the public markets for more – and had also been able to create liquidity events for early investors and staff, by swapping shares off-market to new investors.

Obrecht foreshadowed that Canva – which has made six acquisitions – would soon begin drawing down on its war chest to fuel growth, revealing that 1000 people had been hired in the past 12 months.

“We’re only 1 per cent of the way there,” Perkins said.

While the latest raise is all new shares, the $71 million raising in April was the latest of several liquidity opportunities the firm has provided, which in future will also allow Perkins and Obrecht to gradually draw down to fund their philanthropy.

Perkins said the couple caught the giving bug on a trip to India several years ago, when they met a man “working as hard as he possibly could”, yet who earned only 30 rupees a day – less than $1 – and was homeless, sleeping in a computer cafe.

“Even without Canva, just if I was in a normal job, I’d earn many times that,” she said. “We wanted to use our privileged opportunity to help others like him.”

Canva now claims to have over 60 million monthly active users, up from 55 million at its last raise, and said it was on track to exceed $US1 billion in annualised revenue by the end of 2021. The company has been cashflow positive since 2017.

It claimed there are now more than 500,000 paying teams subscribed to Canva, including from companies like American Airlines, Zoom, SkyScanner, Intel, Salesforce, PayPal, Live Nation and Marriott International.

“Visual communication has emerged as a universal need for teams of every size across almost every industry,” said Perkins, whom with Obrecht launched the start-up in her mother’s Perth living room in 2012.

“People are now using Canva for everything from launching startups to raising awareness for nonprofits, supporting remote learning, collaborating in distributed teams, and managing global enterprise brands at scale.”

Canva said its community had now created more than 7 billion designs since launch, claiming 120 new designs are created every second using Canva’s library of over 800,000 templates and over 100 million design ingredients including photos, videos, stickers, audio tracks, and illustrations.

Over 2 million orders have been received for its printing service, which sends customers their designs on T-shirts, coffee mugs and the like.

Most valuable company

Canva’s new valuation means Canva is possibly Australia’s most valuable unlisted company, with only two companies from the lower-multiple iron ore and manufacturing industries – Hancock Prospecting (at $15.8 billion revenue in 2020-21) and Anthony Pratt’s box-making Visy and Pratt Industries empire ($9 billion) providing serious competition.

Canva is however technically an American company, switching its domicile to Delaware as serious venture capital began flooding in some years ago.

This latest raise will elevate Canva’s founders, who live in Australia and are citizens, further up the Financial Review Rich List.

It is understood that the founding share held by Perkins and Obrecht, alongside that of technical co-founder Cameron Adams, plus a roughly 5 to 10 per cent allocation for an all-employee share scheme, together represents around half of Canva’s equity.

Canva’s success has delivered huge returns to its early Australian backers, some of which Blackbird Ventures has already liquidated in a $100 million return to its limited partners in late 2019.

One of those Blackbird investors, Rayn Ong, put the enormity of Canva’s achievement in context on Wednesday morning.

“I have made over 100 direct angel investments,” he tweeted. “But my indirect investment in Canva is now worth more than everything else combined.”

One follower asked Ong why, after at least fourteen rounds of fundraising, Canva continues to seek capital it doesn’t desperately need.

“When the demand is way greater than the supply, why not?” Ong replied.

Originally published at Tech.mn.

With our newest $55 million Fund III, we are thrilled to announce Matchstick Ventures will continue our investments in pre-seed and seed-stage technology startups with a connection to the Rockies and the North regions of the United States.

Over the last six years, we have invested in over 100 companies and watched the tremendous growth and interest in supporting these regions. In Colorado, investors have already committed $2.6 billion across 168 rounds through mid 2021, more than any full year prior to 2019 and matching what was raised in 2020. The North region is also seeing incredible growth and interest, showing the strength of the entrepreneurs in the market and the interest from investors.

With the close of Fund III, we will continue our investments in software-centric companies, with a focus on pre-seed and seed rounds for companies with a connection to the Rockies and North, such as being based here, a founder here, customer relationships, or a network in these regions.

As our largest fund to date, we will also have more flexibility to write checks between $500,000 and $1.5 million in each company, both leading rounds and also working as a helpful syndication partner. We will always choose the vision and ambition of the entrepreneurs we work with over a specific industry or vertical, and look forward to finding new breakout companies to add to our list, which currently includes:

• Soona – creating fast casual content for ecommerce brands (raised $10.2M Series A from Union Square Ventures)


• Ordermark – powering online ordering for restaurants and ghost kitchens (raised $120M from Softbank)


• Inspectorio – running critical compliance infrastructure for the global supply chain (raised $10M Series A from Techstars)


• Branch – providing accelerated payments to workers (raised $42M Series B from Addition Partners)


• Fiveable – modernizing remote education communities


• Spekit – streamlining employee training and onboarding (raised $12.2M Series A from Foundry Group)


• Parallax – helping service employees stage engaged and accounts profitable (raised $7M Series A from Grotech)


• Cured – enabling healthcare systems to better engage users


• Airspace Link – making drones safer for operators and communities (raised $10M Series A from Altos Ventures)


• and many more!

Beyond just offering funding, as part of Fund III we are also excited to expand our community around the fund and our founders. Much like what we’ve developed at Techstars, we believe that mentorship, connections and access to amazing people can help startups make more progress, faster.

That’s why we are also announcing the launch the Matchstick Strikers, a network of amazing local and national leaders to help companies in the following areas:

• Creating community so our founders have a big network to rely on for help and support


• Finding and attracting great talent


• Solving key problems through hands-on mentorship from experienced operators and leaders


• Connecting with more customers through a network who will facilitate introductions and help our portfolio companies get in front of the right people, partners, and potential customers


• Accessing additional capital through an organized network of co-investors who are specifically interested in investing in these geographic markets and providing additional capital when needed


• Creating world-class cultures and cultivating leadership through an emphasis on personal growth as a catalyst to professional success via coaching


• Adding diversity and focusing on sustainability through resources and connections to help companies understand how diversity and sustainability show up in their company and how they can help to meet their goals

To facilitate this network and help our portfolio companies navigate these new resources and others across our community, we will also be bringing on a Head of Network.

Beyond their financial success, we are also proud that in our last fund 31% of our portfolio companies are impact companies, companies that we believe will generate a measurable, beneficial social or environmental impact alongside financial returns. 54% of our companies are led by at least one underrepresented founder, 31% of our companies have a female founder, 37% of our companies have a non-white founder, and 14% of our companies have a Black founder. We share this data to express pride in our history of working with underrepresented populations, and to ensure they feel comfortable engaging with us as we continue our work with Fund III. We are also proud to have joined Pledge 1% with this Fund and will be donating 1% of our returns to charities through the Pledge 1% organization.

We know we couldn’t have done any of this without you, our community.

We are incredibly grateful to Foundry Group for their continued backing with this fund, as well as a host of incredible institutional and individual limited partners, many of whom call the Rockies and the North home. And the Techstars network, which continues to be a key relationship for us. We appreciate your support and involvement.

We also thank the many founders who have trusted us as a partner on your journey already, and our friends and family who support us on our mission of helping founders.

Lastly, we thank our startup communities in the Rockies and North for your inspiring, positive, and ambitious attitudes, big dreams, and interest in improving our corner of the world.

We’re looking for ambitious founders with novel ideas and who move fast. If that is you, and you have a connection to the Rockies or North regions of the US, we want to hear from you. Please visit matchstickventures.com or reach us on Twitter @MatchstickVC, @NattyZ, @rbroshar.

If you are an investor interested in co-investing in these markets with us at Seed or Series A, please let us know so we can add you to our list of co-investors.

If you are a leader with startup experience and are interested in applying to be part of the Matchstick Strikers, let us know.

Originally posted on: September 20th, 2021

Originally published at Forbes. Written by Alex Konrad.

Canva is now one of the world’s most valuable startups after raising $200 million in new funding at a $40 billion valuation.

The round, led by T. Rowe Price with Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer, Blackbird, Felicis and AirTree all participating, more than doubles the Australian design software company’s valuation in five months.

Canva’s already on a level few startups have reached — not just for a valuation second only to Stripe on the Forbes Cloud 100 list of top private cloud companies. Long profitable and cash-flow positive, Canva continues to more than double in sales, the company says, on pace to reach a $1 billion annualized revenue run-rate by December 2021, the “vast majority” of that recurring subscription revenue. “Moving in the right direction,” cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins says matter-of-factly.

Profitable, doubling growth and with hundreds of millions of revenue — why bother raising at all? One reason, says Perkins, is to keep doubling headcount, which reached 2,000 this year (Perkins says Canva received 180,000 job applications over the past 12 months). Another could be acquisitions, sources close to Canva add. Then there’s Perkins’ own lifelong mission for Canva, one for which she thinks it’s worth it to play it safe.

“It’s a huge vote of confidence in what we’re doing and where we’re going,” Perkins tells Forbes. “I always like to have enough money in the bank that if the lights turned off tomorrow and everything disappeared, we’ve got enough capital to keep us together for a long time.”

With unusual origins in Perth, Australia, and then Sydney, where the company has long been based, Canva defied early skepticism to emerge as one of the world’s most popular and fastest-growing software tools, putting Perkins, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum, on the cover of the magazine in December 2019. Started in 2012 by Perkins, now-husband Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, Canva launched the following year as a tool to help anyone design, from better-looking resumes to menus, business cards and other graphic assets.

Today, Canva’s product has evolved to support video, presentations and most recently, live collaboration. With new websites tools, Perkins says she hopes to help do away with PDF resumes or event invites in favor of responsive sites complete with custom web domains (a product that will pitch Canva, already competitive with Adobe and Vistaprint, up against the likes of Squarespace and Wix). Canva’s library now consists of more than 800,000 templates and 100 million photos, illustrations and fonts. More than 7 billion designs have been created in Canva to date, the company says, with 120 new designs each second.

Originally known as a tool for amateur designers or small businesses, Canva’s freemium software is used by more than 60 million monthly users. But more than 500,000 paying teams now use Canva, too, including companies like American Airlines, CBRE, Intel, Kimberly-Clark and Zoom, for everything from social media assets to sales and human resources presentations, or, in the case of Live Nation, assets for upcoming rock concerts.

The new funding dramatically increases the value of Canva’s founders’ stakes in the business, previously valued at $15 billion valuation in April. Forbes estimates that Perkins and Obrecht each own about 18% of Canva, and Adams 9%. At a $40 billion valuation, that means Perkins and Obrecht each hold stakes valued at $6.5 billion, while Adams’ stake is valued at $3.2 billion. (Forbes deducts 10% for private company holdings.)

But already on the record that they didn’t plan to “hoard” such wealth, Perkins and Obrecht are now pledging to give away 30% of Canva — the “vast majority” of their stakes — to the Canva Foundation to be used for charitable causes. “If the whole thing was about building wealth that would be the most uninspiring thing I could possibly imagine,” Perkins tells Forbes. “It has felt strange when people refer to us as ‘billionaires’ as it has never felt like our money, we’ve always felt that we’re purely custodians of it,” she added in a blog post.

Canva first plans to pilot its charitable giving through a $10 million donation to non-profit GiveDirectly to distribute to vulnerable families in Southern Africa; it plans to ramp up its giving after that.

It’s all part of what Perkins has long described as a “two step plan” for maximum impact: “become one of the most valuable companies in the world, and do the best we can do.” On the first count, Canva’s well on its way, with no shortage of investors looking to pony up money even at a valuation more typical of a public company (Perkins says she has no current interest in an IPO). On the second, Canva joined the Pledge 1% movement in the past to donate time, money, equity and resources to charity; the startup works with 60,000 schools today and 130,000 non-profits. Canva has also committed to plant one tree for each print order it services, a tally that’s reached 2 million to date.

“As we continue to make progress on step one, step two becomes more important than ever,” says Perkins. “We really feel a huge responsibility… it shouldn’t matter where you are in the world, or socioeconomic status, or your skills and experience, everyone should have the ability to design.”

Originally published on PR Newswire.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 27, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Blend (NYSE: BLND), a leader in cloud banking solutions, today announced the launch of Blend Impact, a program focused on increasing access and equity in housing and financial services. The program brings together Blend’s non-profit, industry, and community ecosystem partners to help drive equitable outcomes in access, sustainability, and social good.

“Blend’s mission is to expand access to the world’s financial resources, and we are committed to creating a more inclusive financial services ecosystem for everyone,” said Nima Ghamsari, co-founder and head of Blend. “Historically, access to financial services and opportunities for transferable wealth have not been equally available to all. We have designed the Blend Impact program to enable our teams to drive meaningful change in the industry to address these systemic flaws and build better lives for those in the communities we serve.”

The initiatives that are part of the Blend Impact launch include:

• Equitable Ecosystem Initiative (EEI): Together with its customers and partners, including DHI Mortgage, Blend has established an initiative focused on building technology that enables financial inclusion and economic opportunity, exploring homebuyer education, additional language support, and alternative data sources for credit underwriting as potential areas of work with partners and customers.

“DHI Mortgage continues to focus on making homeownership accessible for all and we are proud to partner with Blend in the Equitable Ecosystem Initiative (EEI),” said DHI Mortgage President and CEO Sonya Luechauer, “We are excited about the opportunity to collaborate with Blend and others in the EEI to improve lending solutions for minority homebuyers.”

Over the course of the pandemic, Blend has allocated over $450,000 to groups that work to address socio-economic, systemic, and social issues throughout the United States. Some of this money was donated to organizations and nonprofits including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, National Alliance to End Homelessness, National Urban League, Asian Pacific Fund, Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund, and Indian Red Cross. Blend also helps fund organizations affecting change for the underbanked through partnerships with the National Bankers Association (NBA), HomeFree USA, and TechEquity Collaborative.

As a part of this initiative, Blend has offered access to its platform technology to Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs) and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) at no cost.

“We are proud to be a partner of Blend Impact and provide our member banks an opportunity to increase their capital through new technology,” said Nicole Elam, president and CEO of the National Bankers Association. “We know that marginalized communities have a better opportunity at economic equality when supporting the institutions that support them.”

Blend has also deposited $5M into a bank with a plan to invest all interest on the money into the bank’s MDI Initiative, directly benefiting an MDI the bank has partnered with.

• Blend Gives Back: Alongside Blend’s commitment to building equitable products, we encourage employees to support causes of their choice by offering 24 hours of paid time off for participating in volunteer programs within their communities. In addition, this program will allocate a day of service each year for volunteering time towards a designated cause across the company. Blend’s focus for 2021 is on causes rooted in ending homelessness and its day of service was conducted in June with employees volunteering across food banks and non-profit organizations focused on ending homelessness.
  
  


• Pledge 1%: In May 2021, Blend joined more than 1,500 other companies in pledging one percent of product development and employee time toward supporting the Equitable Ecosystem Initiative. This commitment helps shape Blend’s thinking around environmental, social, and governance activities and initiatives.

In addition to these initiatives, Blend Impact activities also include commitments to supplier diversity, in-kind event sponsorships, corporate philanthropy, and regulatory engagement, among others. Blend will continue to examine other areas where it can drive specific and effective changes to increase access to housing and financial services, specifically in the areas of corporate governance and environmental impact.

For more information on Blend and the Blend Impact program, please visit blend.com or email blend-impact@blend.com.

About Blend

Blend’s cloud banking platform is designed to power the end-to-end consumer journey for any banking product from application to close. Our technology is used by Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, and over 290 other financial services firms to acquire more customers, increase productivity, and deepen relationships. Through our software, we enable our customers to process an average of more than $5 billion in loans per day, helping consumers get into homes and gain access to the capital they need to lead better lives. To learn more, visit blend.com.

Media Contact:

Natalie Pridham

blend@methodcommunications.com