2024 UTS Startups Summit

Cliff Obrecht is COO and co-founder of Canva, an online visual communication and collaboration platform with a mission to empower the whole world to design. Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown to more than 85 million monthly users around the world, and has achieved the milestone of more than $1 billion in annualized revenue. From presentations to videos and websites, more than 13 billion designs have been created with the platform (that’s 180 designs every second) across more than 190 different countries and in over 100 different languages.

In the last couple of years, as millions of people around the world embraced a hybrid way of working, Canva experienced its biggest period of hypergrowth yet and continues to go from strength to strength thanks to a global team of more than 3,000 people. In 2021, Canva was valued at $40 billion, following a $200m funding round. This saw it become one of the most valuable private software companies in the world. Individual creators, small businesses, teams and the Fortune 500 are embracing the power of design, photos, collaboration features,videos and even sound to cut through the noise and achieve their goals using Canva.  

Cliff got his start in business in 2007, after graduating from a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education at the University of Western Australia. He and CEO, Melanie Perkins, then founded Fusion Books, which took the idea of a simple design tool, and applied it to the niche market of school yearbooks. Over five years, Fusion Books grew into the largest yearbook company in Australia, and expanded into France and New Zealand. Having known all along that the technology could be applied more broadly, the Canva product was soon brought to life. 

Marcus Jones is a 23-year-old entrepreneur and content creator. Starting his career as a YouTuber, Marcus quickly made a mark in the industry, joining one of the top marketing agencies in Wollongong and working his way up to Chief Strategist at 19 years old.

Along his professional journey, Marcus has built multiple successful online businesses, has personally reached +50,000,000 YouTube views, has worked with clients in 89 different countries (including HarperColins, Disney Radio, TikTok, Football Australia, Super Rugby, Logitech, Epic Games, Wondershare, and Fiverr), was invited to become an Industry Fellow of UTS, launched a software company Velio.co, and has mastered the art of writing bios that make him sound like a complete douche. 

Jesaiah Creek is a 17-year-old Australian student  who loves playing the saxophone. Using Apple's Swift programming language, Jesaiah built SaxApp, a way for anyone to learn how to play the saxophone using just their phone.

Jesaiah has been the recipient of international awards, including the 2024 & 2023 Apple Swift Student Challenge, 2023 Australian Defence Force Future Innovators Award, and the 2022 National Young ICT Explorers Award.

Beyond coding and music, Jesaiah enjoys building model rockets and teaching programming skills to others.

Holly Cardew is the Founder and CEO of Carted, a company transforming how we shop.

The idea for Carted began during the pandemic when Holly was building a shoppable TikTok feed and realised how complex shopping still is for consumers.

Carted’s vision is simple: to make shopping better for shoppers. By focusing on shopper needs, Carted has created the ultimate wishlist app that helps people organise and manage their shopping while notifying them of any price changes and stock availability.  Holly and the team continue to build on what Carted is today, building solutions for every part of the shopping journey—from finding inspiration to making better, more informed shopping decisions.

Prior to Carted, Holly has built and grown other software apps and still has multiple apps in the Shopify app store used by ten of thousands of online merchants.