Canva Cuts 1,271 Jobs, 22% of Staff, as Its Growth Slows

Canva, the Australian design software company, is eliminating 1,271 jobs, or 22% of its global workforce. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins told employees that the company’s growth had slowed for the first time in a decade, TechCrunch and RTTNews reported.

The cuts are part of a wider restructuring that also merges teams, moves some roles to central hubs and brings staff back to offices part of the week. Canva has also cut its revenue growth forecast to 20% from 30% as spending on artificial intelligence climbs.

What Perkins told staff

In an email to employees on Wednesday, Nov. 4, Perkins called the restructuring the hardest moment in the company’s 13-year history, The Guardian reported, according to indica News. In the note quoted by TechCrunch, she wrote that “success in our first chapter doesn’t guarantee success in the next” and said this had been the company’s hardest year.

The changes include job cuts, adjustments to existing roles and relocations to centralized hubs. Perkins acknowledged that moving could be a major decision for employees and said Canva would support those affected.

Severance terms for departing employees

According to The Guardian’s report, as cited by indica News, employees who lose their jobs will get:

• At least six months’ salary
• Healthcare coverage for another 12 months in countries where the company provides that benefit
• Their company laptops to keep
• The option to apply for grants of $10,000 to start their own businesses

Canva has not said how many of the 1,271 positions are in the United States.

How the company is reorganizing

Canva is combining its product, growth and platform teams, a step TechCrunch said is meant to reduce communication friction. The company is also cutting back on what it calls “subspecialisation,” so remaining employees may be asked to take on broader responsibilities. Staff will move to a hybrid model and work from an office several days a week.

What it means for Canva employees and users

For remaining staff, the restructuring means bigger roles, team changes and more time in the office. For the company, the pressure comes from two directions. Canva has been building its own AI models to cut costs and depend less on outside providers, TechCrunch reported, yet AI expenses still forced the lower growth forecast. Early investors also marked down its valuation to about $35 billion earlier this year.

Competition is also rising. Canva’s core product, tools for making posters, presentations and promotional materials, now overlaps with AI startups and with general chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, which can generate images for the same tasks.

Other tech companies reshaping staff around AI

The Canva cuts come nearly a week after Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees in a restructuring tied to its focus on AI, CNBC reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. That group is about 27% of Microsoft’s global workforce of roughly 223,000, according to the report.

A joint study by the International Labour Organization and Poland’s National Research Institute found that nearly one in four jobs worldwide is potentially exposed to generative AI. The study said changes to job duties are more likely than widespread job losses. It estimated that about 34% of jobs in high-income countries are in exposed occupations, compared with 11% in low-income countries.

Women face higher risk in the study’s findings. In high-income countries, jobs most at risk of AI-driven task automation account for 9.6% of female employment, nearly three times the share for men. Worldwide, the figures are 4.7% for women and 2.4% for men, a gap the study tied to the larger number of women in clerical and administrative work.

Sources: indica News, RTTNews, TechCrunch