Canva Cuts 1,271 Jobs, 22% of Staff, Amid Slowing Growth

Canva is cutting 1,271 jobs, or 22% of its workforce, as the design-software company confronts its slowest growth in a decade, according to TechCrunch. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins told employees in a note that the company must change to address the slowdown, calling it "our hardest year yet."

How Many Jobs Is Canva Cutting?

The cut totals 1,271 positions, a figure that represents 22% of Canva's staff, TechCrunch reported. The reduction is one of the largest the Sydney-founded company has disclosed since it reached its current scale.

Why Is Canva Laying Off Workers Now?

Perkins pointed to a growth slowdown that began this year — the first in ten years, by the company's own account. "Yet success in our first chapter doesn't guarantee success in the next. 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," Perkins wrote in the note, cited by TechCrunch.

Two numbers frame the pressure behind that slowdown. Canva cut its revenue growth forecast to 20% from 30% this year, TechCrunch reported, as the company absorbs what it described as ballooning AI costs. Earlier this year, that slower outlook contributed to early investors marking down Canva's valuation to about $35 billion, according to the same report.

Competition is compounding the squeeze. TechCrunch notes that AI startups and general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini now offer image-generation tools that let users assemble posters and presentations without Canva's design templates — eroding a use case the company has built its business around for thirteen years.

What Did CEO Melanie Perkins Tell Employees?

Perkins framed the moment as a turning point rather than a retreat. "Over the past thirteen years, we've turned a dream in a pitch deck into a platform used by hundreds of millions of people. None of it would have been possible without the talent, imagination, and care of every single person who has been part of this journey," she wrote, according to TechCrunch's account of the internal note.

The company did not frame the cuts as a response to a single quarter's numbers, but as a structural reset tied to a multiyear growth trajectory that Perkins said has shifted for the first time since Canva's early years.

How Is Canva Restructuring Its Teams?

Alongside the layoffs, Canva is merging its product, growth, and platform teams into a single structure intended to cut down on communication friction, TechCrunch reported. The company is also reducing what it calls "subspecialisation" — meaning remaining employees will likely be asked to take on broader sets of responsibilities rather than narrow, specialized roles.

Canva is additionally shifting toward hybrid work, asking staff to be in the office several days a week, according to the report. The combination of a flatter org chart, broader job scopes, and more in-person time points to a company trying to move faster with fewer people rather than simply shrinking in place.

What Does This Mean for Canva's Valuation and AI Strategy?

Canva's response to rising AI costs has been to build its own models rather than rely solely on third-party systems, TechCrunch reported — a strategy aimed at controlling the expenses now cutting into its growth forecast. That bet has not yet been enough to hold off the valuation markdown that followed the slower outlook earlier this year, when early investors cut their estimate of the company's worth to roughly $35 billion.

The layoffs land at a moment when the products threatening Canva's core business — AI chatbots capable of generating finished graphics from a text prompt — are improving quickly. Whether Canva's in-house AI models and flattened team structure let it out-build that competition, or whether the cuts mark the start of a longer contraction, is not yet answered by the numbers the company has disclosed. For now, Perkins's note to staff describes a company trying to hold onto thirteen years of growth by changing how it is organized rather than what it sells.