Brendan Humphreys spent 12 years at Canva, joining in 2014 when the company had just a dozen employees. He left in 2026 as CTO of a global design platform used by hundreds of millions of people. Before Canva, he co-founded Cenqua, an Australian developer tools company acquired by Atlassian in 2007, and spent seven years at Atlassian as a Principal Developer. 

Brendan’s giving is focused on strengthening Australian democracy. He funds a number of interlocking causes: evidence-based policy research; organisations that improve the quality of public debate and civic engagement; and community-led participation in politics. He also gives to human rights, ethics education, and the arts.

Many of these causes are not tax-deductible, so Brendan runs a portfolio that mixes DGR giving through a sub-fund with direct grants and impact investments to non-DGR organisations. He’d argue that restricting giving to DGR causes rules out a lot of the highest-leverage work in this space.

“Almost every reward in my career traces back to luck: where I was born, being a man in a male-dominated industry, who I happened to meet, joining the right companies at the right time. What that luck paid out was wildly out of proportion to anything I did to earn it. I don’t think you get to keep all of that and call it fair.”