Canva

Melanie Perkins pitched Canva 100 times before getting funded. The idea: make graphic design accessible to people who can't afford or learn Adobe Creative Suite. Canva now has 170+ million monthly users, a $26 billion valuation, and has become the default design tool for non-designers — social media managers, teachers, small business owners, and anyone who needs a presentation that doesn't look like it was made in PowerPoint. The free tier is absurdly generous (250,000+ templates, millions of stock photos). Canva is to Photoshop what Google Docs was to Microsoft Word.