Canva is cutting 1,271 jobs, 22% of its global workforce, CEO Melanie Perkins said in a memo to staff on Wednesday. The figure covers layoffs, role changes and relocations to centralised hubs, and puts the pre-cut headcount at roughly 5,800. Perkins wrote that growth has slowed for the first time in a decade and that “small changes won’t be enough.” Her memo does not attribute the cuts to AI replacing roles.
In August, Canva lowered its 2026 revenue growth forecast to 20% from 30%, after the cost of serving AI features on frontier models ran well above budget. Second-quarter revenue grew about 25% year on year. Blackbird Ventures and Airtree then cut their marks on Canva from $42 billion to $34.9 billion, and the valuation used for employee share sales fell from $38.9 billion to $31 billion. Perkins has said the cost per AI task is down nearly 90% since Canva AI 2.0 launched in April, and the company has started shipping its own models, including the in-house image model Canva Craft, to reduce reliance on third-party providers. Canva has been free-cash-flow positive for nine years and held $1.47 billion in cash at the end of June.
Canva is merging its Product, Growth and Platform groups into a single product organisation, after finding that improving one part of the product meant handovers across all three. Roles will become broader as specialisation is scaled back, and the company is moving from remote-first to hybrid, with staff expected in an office a few days a week.
Departing employees get at least six months’ salary, twelve months of healthcare cover where Canva currently provides it, and twelve months of its employee assistance programme, extended to family members.
ChatGPT and Gemini can now generate posters and presentations from a prompt, and start-ups such as Gamma have added image generation to go after Canva and Adobe. Adobe’s Photoshop and Express are available inside ChatGPT as of December. T. Rowe Price had already written down its Canva stake by 67.6% in 2023, and Canva has been weighing a Nasdaq listing, according to Capital Brief.
Conversations with affected employees will be staggered across the 37 countries where Canva has teams, depending on local requirements. A company-wide meeting is scheduled for November 10.