Canva Restructuring Hits 22% of Staff as Growth Slows for First Time in a Decade

Canva is restructuring in a way that touches 1,271 people, or 22% of its entire staff, after co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins told employees that growth has slowed for the first time in a decade. "This is without doubt the hardest moment in our thirteen-year history," Perkins wrote in a note to staff that Canva published on its newsroom.

The numbers are blunt. TechCrunch described the move as a 22% staff cut. The Next Web, citing Tiffany Li of The Information, reported it is Canva's first round of job cuts since the company was founded in 2013. That detail matters: a company that spent thirteen years hiring without a single layoff round has now restructured at a scale most tech firms hit years earlier.

The stakes for the broader market are easy to state. Canva is one of the largest privately held software companies still standing outside the US, with 260 million monthly users and $3.5 billion in revenue last year, according to its 2025 review as cited by The Next Web. When a company that size hits its first growth wall, the cause is usually structural, and in Canva's case the cause has a name: AI economics.

Why is Canva cutting now?

Perkins put the decision squarely on 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. Her framing went further than a routine cost-cutting memo. She said "small changes won't be enough" and that Canva needs to "refound" itself around small teams that make their own decisions.

That language tracks with the financial picture. In August, Canva cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast to 20%, down from 30%, a figure The Next Web attributed to the Australian Financial Review. TechCrunch tied that downgrade to rising AI costs and reported that early investors marked Canva's valuation down to about $35 billion this year.

The cost side of the AI equation has two parts for Canva. First, running AI features at scale is expensive. Second, building your own models to escape that per-use cost is expensive too. Canva has chosen the second path. Last month it released Canva Craft, its first image model built entirely from scratch, which debuted fourth on the DesignArena leaderboard.

There's also an infrastructure angle. Bessemer Venture Partners counts Canva among the companies that have moved production work to inference provider fal — the same fal that raised $1.3 billion this week. Canva is not alone in that shift, but it shows where the money is going: into raw compute for serving models, not into headcount for design tools.

The demand side is just as pressing. TechCrunch noted that ChatGPT and Gemini now let people put together posters and presentations on their own. That is Canva's core product, and the general-purpose chatbots are absorbing it from below. Takeaway: Canva is being squeezed between the cost of AI and competitors who give away what Canva charges for.

What changes inside the company?

The biggest structural move folds three separate functions — Product, Growth and Platform — into a single Product Org. Perkins explained the reasoning in her note. Improving one part of Canva "often requires navigating between Product, Growth and Platform, with more handovers and coordination than necessary," she wrote.

Alongside that merger, Canva will absorb narrow subspecialties into broader roles and remove layers of management. Fewer handovers, fewer managers, fewer specialized jobs — a flattening that mirrors what the "refounding" language implies.

Geography shifts too. Sydney becomes the primary home for more of Canva's product teams, plus some roles in other specialties. The note doesn't specify how many of the 1,271 affected people will leave versus change roles or relocate to what Perkins called "centralised hubs."

Office attendance is also tightening. From January, most hybrid employees are expected in the office about two to three days a week. That's a return-to-office push bundled into an already difficult restructuring.

Takeaway: Canva is trading a multi-team structure for one product organization, concentrated in Sydney, with a mandate for smaller, faster teams.

What do departing employees get?

The severance terms are unusually specific for a restructuring announcement. Departing employees receive at least six months of salary, including statutory entitlements, regardless of where they are based.

The equity terms also changed for recent joiners. Canva is dropping the one-year vesting cliff for people who joined in the past year, meaning they keep whatever equity has accrued rather than losing it all at the twelve-month mark.

Other benefits:

• Healthcare extended for 12 months in countries where Canva already provides it
• 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
• Canva says it will take no equity in what grant recipients build

Interested employees have until Dec. 14 to register interest in the fund. Takeaway: the package is generous by layoff standards, and the no-equity grant fund is a deliberate signal about how Perkins wants this handled.

Is Canva alone in this?

No, and the pattern is widening. The Next Web pointed to Squarespace, which said Monday it is laying off 19% of its staff. Microsoft offered buyouts to about 60,000 workers last month. Design tools, website builders and software giants are all cutting at once, and AI spending is the common thread.

Canva's situation is distinct in one respect: this is its first cut in thirteen years, triggered by its first growth slowdown in a decade. The restructurings at Microsoft and Squarespace land on companies that have already been through rounds of trimming.

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

What happens next?

The near-term calendar is set: all-hands Nov. 10, org meetings from Nov. 11, grant registrations by Dec. 14, and the two-to-three-day office expectation from January. The longer-term question is whether the "refounding" — one Product Org, Sydney concentration, Canva Craft, fal-based inference — can restore the growth rate Canva just abandoned in its own forecast.

The forecast cut from 30% to 20% is the number to watch. If Craft and the restructured organization can't close that gap while ChatGPT and Gemini keep eating into casual design work, this round of cuts may not be the last.