Canva Restructuring Hits 22% of Its Staff After Growth Slowed for the First Time in a Decade

Canva is restructuring in a way that touches 1,271 people, or 22% of the company, merging teams, moving more product work to Sydney and ending some jobs outright. “This is without doubt the hardest moment in our thirteen-year history,” co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins wrote in a note to staff that Canva published on its newsroom.

The note doesn’t say how many of the 1,271 will leave and how many will instead change roles or be asked to relocate to what Perkins called “centralised hubs.” TechCrunch described it as a 22% staff cut. The Next Web, citing Tiffany Li of The Information, said it is Canva’s first round of job cuts since the company was founded in 2013.

Growth slowed, and AI got expensive

Perkins put the decision down to growth. “This has been our hardest year yet, and as we shared earlier this year, our growth has slowed for the first time in a decade,” she wrote, adding that “small changes won’t be enough” and that Canva needs to “refound” itself around small teams that make their own decisions.

In August, Canva cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast to 20% from 30%, a figure The Next Web attributed to the Australian Financial Review. TechCrunch tied that cut to rising AI costs and said early investors marked Canva’s valuation down to about $35 billion this year. The design company has been building its own models to rely less on outside providers. Last month it released Canva Craft, its first image model built from scratch, which debuted fourth on the DesignArena leaderboard. Bessemer Venture Partners also counts Canva among the companies that have moved production work to inference provider fal, which raised $1.3 billion this week. Meanwhile, TechCrunch noted, ChatGPT and Gemini now let people put together posters and presentations on their own.

One product org, more time in Sydney

The biggest structural change folds Product, Growth and Platform into a single Product Org. Improving one part of Canva “often requires navigating between Product, Growth and Platform, with more handovers and coordination than necessary,” Perkins wrote. The company will also absorb narrow subspecialties into broader roles and remove layers of management.

Sydney will become the primary home for more of Canva’s product teams, plus some roles in other specialties. From January, most hybrid employees are expected in the office about two to three days a week.

Departing employees get at least six months of salary, including statutory entitlements, wherever they are based. Canva is dropping the one-year vesting cliff for people who joined in the past year, extending healthcare for 12 months in countries where it already provides it, and letting leavers keep their Canva MacBooks. A new Canva Collective Fund offers US$10,000 grants to departing staff who want to start a business or community project, and Canva says it will take no equity in what they build. They have until Dec. 14 to register interest.

Canva had 260 million monthly users and $3.5 billion in revenue last year, according to its 2025 review as cited by The Next Web. The outlet also pointed to Squarespace, which said Monday it is laying off 19% of its staff. Microsoft offered buyouts to about 60,000 workers last month.

Because Canva has staff in 37 countries, the timing of individual conversations will vary with local rules. The full company is scheduled to meet at an all-hands on Nov. 10, with org-level meetings starting Nov. 11.