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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. |
