Canva is cutting 22% of its staff, or 1,271 people, as growth slows. Here is what changes inside the company and what users should expect.
Canva is cutting 1,271 jobs, about 22% of its workforce, co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins told staff in a note on Tuesday, Nov. 3. The Verge and TechCrunch both reported the news. Perkins called it the company's "hardest year yet" and said small changes would not be enough, so Canva is reorganizing its teams, shifting more product work to Sydney and asking most hybrid employees back in an office two to three days a week starting in January.
How many Canva jobs are being cut, and who is affected?
The number is 1,271 people, according to both outlets. The Verge notes that not everyone affected is being laid off. Some workers will get different roles or be asked to relocate to what Perkins called centralized hubs, and others will leave the company.
Employees who are let go will get at least six months of salary, twelve months of healthcare coverage and career support resources, The Verge reports. Canva has not said, in what we have read, how the cuts break down by country or team.
What is Canva changing inside the company?
According to Perkins' note as quoted by The Verge, Canva will merge its Product, Growth and Platform teams into a single product organization, cut management layers and combine overlapping responsibilities. Sydney becomes the "primary home" for more of the product teams. TechCrunch adds that Canva wants to reduce narrow specialization, which means people may be asked to cover more ground.
Perkins wrote that Canva needs to "refound" itself and return to small teams that can make decisions on their own. She also said growth has slowed for the first time in a decade.
Why is Canva cutting back now?
TechCrunch points to money and competition. It says Canva has been building its own AI models to lower costs and depend less on outside providers, but still had to cut its revenue growth forecast to 20% from 30% because AI costs ballooned. TechCrunch also reports, citing Australian business press, that early investors marked the company's valuation down to about $35 billion earlier this year. Those two figures come from TechCrunch's reporting, not from Canva's note.
The other pressure is that chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini can now make posters and slide decks from a text prompt, which is the kind of quick design work many people used to open Canva for. Startups like Gamma are also going after Canva and Adobe, per TechCrunch.
What this does and does not mean for users
Canva has not announced any change to plans, prices or features in this memo, and nothing in the reporting says the service is affected. If you use Canva for school, a small business or a side project, you should not see anything different today. The memo is about how the company is organized.
It also lands in a rough week for the sector. The Verge notes that Squarespace announced layoffs affecting 19% of its staff on Nov. 2, the day before Canva's news.
Our take
Our read, and it is only that: Canva is a good example of a software company that grew fast on a simple promise, easy design for everybody, and now has to defend that promise against free AI tools built into the apps people already open every day. A reorganization with fewer layers and more responsibility per person is a familiar response, and it usually shows up in the product only after a few quarters. The thing to watch is whether Canva's own AI features keep its paying users from drifting to chatbots.
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Picture credit: Photo: Web Summit (CC BY 2.0)
