Canva Restructures 22% of Its Workforce in First Company-Wide Cuts as AI Costs and Slower Growth Force a Reset

Introduction

Canva, the Australian design platform used by hundreds of millions of people to make everything from school posters to corporate presentations, has announced the most difficult decision in its 13-year history. On November 4, 2026, co-founder and chief executive Melanie Perkins told staff that 1,271 people, about 22 percent of the company’s global workforce, will be affected by a sweeping restructure. Some will lose their jobs, others will see their roles change, and some will be asked to relocate. The announcement marks the first company-wide round of job cuts since Canva was founded in 2013, and it arrives after a year in which the company’s growth slowed for the first time in a decade. Perkins said the company had explored alternatives before concluding that small changes would not be enough, and that Canva needed to “refound” itself around smaller, more empowered teams. The restructure also exposes a tension at the heart of the modern software business: the same artificial intelligence tools that have driven Canva’s growth have become far more expensive to run than the company expected, squeezing the economics of a business that had long paired fast growth with steady profits. This is the story of what Canva announced, why it happened, what it means for the people affected, and what remains unanswered — Canva restructure 22% workforce November 2026.

1. What Canva announced on November 4

The announcement came in an email from Perkins to staff on Wednesday, November 4, which Canva also published on its newsroom. The headline figure was stark: 1,271 roles affected, equal to about 22 percent of the workforce. The company operates in 37 countries, so the timing and process for discussions with affected employees will vary according to local rules. Canva has scheduled a company-wide meeting for November 10, followed by meetings inside each part of the business from November 11, when more detail is expected about which functions will shrink, which roles will be combined and how many employees will be asked to relocate.

1.1 The 1,271 figure is an impact number, not a layoff count

The most important detail in the announcement is also the most easily misunderstood. The figure of 1,271 covers people whose roles will change, people asked to relocate and employees who will leave. Canva has not published a breakdown of those categories, and it has not said how many of the affected employees will lose their jobs outright. Independent reports describe the announcement as Canva’s first job-cut round since its founding, but the exact number of redundancies remains undisclosed. Because 1,271 represents 22 percent of the workforce, the figure implies a pre-restructure workforce of roughly 5,800 people by simple arithmetic, though that is an estimate rather than a headcount Canva has separately reported. The distinction matters: every report that calls this 1,271 layoffs overstates what the company has confirmed.

1.2 A first in 13 years

Canva was founded in Sydney in 2013 by Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, and it grew for more than a decade without a company-wide round of cuts. That record is part of why the announcement landed so heavily inside the company. In January 2026, Capital Brief reported that Canva cut 32 jobs in its finance division, and in March this year the company had confirmed it had no plans to lay off staff. Rumours had been circulating inside the company about another round of redundancies in November or a possible hiring freeze, and on the evening before the announcement a person at Canva told reporters that staff would hear about redundancies on Wednesday morning and that the company was planning a cut of about 20 percent. The final figure of 22 percent was close to that expectation, but the breadth of the restructure — touching product, growth and platform teams across 37 countries — was wider than a single departmental cut.

2. Why growth slowed for the first time in a decade

Perkins said Canva’s growth slowed for the first time in a decade and described 2026 as the company’s hardest year yet. The slowdown sits at the centre of the restructure: a company that had doubled its revenue roughly every couple of years, from a targeted figure of about 1 billion dollars annualized in 2021 to about 4 billion dollars in annualized revenue by the end of 2025, suddenly found its growth engine straining.

2.1 The growth forecast cut

In early August, Canva cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast from roughly 30 percent to about 20 percent, a rare guidance reduction for a company built on profitable expansion. The cut followed second-quarter revenue of 921.9 million dollars, up 25.2 percent year over year, which came in short of internal expectations. At roughly 4 billion dollars in annualized revenue, a 20 percent growth year still adds on the order of 800 million dollars in new revenue, but the direction of travel changed the conversation inside and outside the company. Free cash flow margin fell to 14 percent in the second quarter from 27 percent in the first, and shares in secondary trading dropped 15 percent after the disclosure. The company’s largest institutional backers have collectively marked down its valuation by approximately 10 billion dollars over recent weeks, from its August 2025 high of 42 billion dollars toward the low-30 billion dollar range, according to the Australian Financial Review.

2.2 The AI cost problem

The trigger for the forecast cut was the cost of artificial intelligence. Canva AI 2.0, the agentic upgrade released in April 2026, pushed users to generate three times as many designs — and every one of those designs consumes inference compute. Perkins told investors in her second-quarter shareholder letter that Canva had been “relying too heavily on frontier models” from third-party providers, and several of its first-party AI models were not ready for release when Canva AI 2.0 shipped. Some AI features reportedly cost six times more to serve than what users pay for them. The company says cost per task has fallen by nearly 90 percent since April, the payoff from re-architected model routing that sends each job to the cheapest model that can handle it, yet AI users now produce roughly three times as many designs, so the volume gain swamps the per-task savings and total inference spend stays high. The ten-point forecast cut, from 30 percent to 20 percent, is a concrete signal that the cost of serving AI has become an earnings risk for software at scale.

3. The “refound” plan: smaller teams, one product organisation

Perkins framed the restructure not as a simple cost cut but as a rebuilding of the company. She said Canva needed to “refound” the business around smaller, more empowered teams, and that small changes would not be enough. The organisational changes that follow from that framing are structural rather than cosmetic.

3.1 Merging Product, Growth and Platform

Canva will combine its Product, Growth and Platform groups into a single Product organisation, reduce organisational layers and merge overlapping roles. The aim, as described in the announcement, is to remove management layers and consolidate responsibilities that had grown up around separate teams. Sydney will become the primary home for more product teams, concentrating the company’s product work in the city where it was founded. Most hybrid staff will be expected in the office two to three days a week from January, a shift toward more face-to-face working that Perkins linked to the smaller-teams model.

3.2 The Sydney hub and the return to the office

The decision to make Sydney the main base for more product teams has direct consequences for staff outside Australia. Some employees will be asked to relocate to centralised hubs, and the company has not said how many of the 1,271 roles are in Australia or how the impact splits across its 37 countries. The office-attendance change from January applies to most hybrid staff, and it sits alongside the relocation asks as part of the same consolidation. For a company that grew into a global remote-friendly workforce, the move back toward a Sydney-centred, office-present product organisation is one of the clearest signs of how far the “refound” is intended to reach.

4. What departing staff will receive

The departure package Canva announced has drawn unusual praise for a layoff round, and it is worth setting out in full because it shapes how the restructure will be judged. Every employee who leaves will receive at least six months of salary, inclusive of statutory entitlements, regardless of location.

4.1 Six months’ pay, healthcare and laptops

Departing employees will receive at least six months of salary in any country, with statutory redundancy entitlements counted inside that figure rather than paid on top. They will also receive 12 months of healthcare where Canva provides it, career transition assistance, and they can keep the laptops they were issued. Vesting cliffs on equity will be waived. One person made redundant at Canva told reporters that many people are angry that annual leave is counted inside the six months, a reminder that even a generous package is experienced differently by the people receiving it. The package is notably more generous than the statutory minimums in most of the countries where Canva operates, and it has been widely noted as such in coverage of the announcement.

4.2 The Canva Collective Fund

Canva is also launching the Canva Collective Fund, under which departing staff can apply for grants of 10,000 US dollars to start a business or run a project that benefits their local community. Canva will take no stake in whatever they build. Leavers have until December 14, 2026 to register their interest. The fund is a distinctive element of the package: rather than simply paying people to leave, Canva is offering seed funding to those who want to strike out on their own. Whether the fund produces lasting new businesses will only become clear over the coming year, but its existence signals that the company wants the departure story to be about new beginnings as well as endings.

5. The AI question: cost, substitution and strategy

The restructure has revived a debate that runs through the whole software industry in 2026: is AI a tailwind for companies like Canva, or the thing that commoditises them? Canva’s own position is complicated, because AI is simultaneously its biggest growth driver and its biggest cost problem.

5.1 AI costs versus AI substitution

Responding to questions about the India impact, a Canva spokesperson clarified that while the technology is changing the products the company develops and the skills it requires, the organisational changes are not intended to substitute employees with AI. The company has said the changes are about setting Canva up to build those products, not using AI to do the work of people who are leaving. That distinction matters to staff and to observers, because the timing — a restructure driven in part by AI costs, announced in the same year that AI tools became dramatically more capable — invites the opposite reading. Canva runs about 800 million AI tool uses a month, and its Magic Studio suite has been used more than 5 billion times cumulatively since launch, so AI is deeply embedded in the product. The question of whether the restructure is really about AI replacing roles, whatever the company says, is likely to follow Canva for months.

5.2 Building in-house models to cut serving costs

Canva’s answer to the cost problem has been to build its own models. The company has slashed AI servicing costs by approximately 90 percent through developing proprietary in-house models and acquiring AI startups such as Leonardo.AI, which it bought for a reported 370 million dollars. Its video model now runs 17 times cheaper than comparable frontier models, while its image model costs 30 times less. In 2026 Canva also acquired Cavalry and MangoAI for motion graphics and AI video advertising. The strategy is to reduce dependence on expensive third-party frontier models, and the cost-per-task figures suggest it is working — but as the second-quarter numbers show, falling unit costs have not yet been enough to offset the surge in usage. The restructure can be read as the organisational half of the same strategy: cheaper models on the technology side, smaller teams on the people side.

6. Canva’s business at a glance

To understand why a restructure of this size matters, it helps to set out the scale of the company. Canva ended 2025 very close to 4 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, with about 3.5 billion dollars recognised, and says it has been profitable for around eight straight years on a cash and operating basis, though statutory filings show accounting losses driven by share grants.

6.1 Scale: users, revenue and enterprise

Canva reports more than 265 million monthly active users, with users creating more than one billion designs every month, and more than 31 million paying users — roughly a 12 percent free-to-paid conversion. Its business-to-business arm reportedly reached about 500 million dollars in annual recurring revenue growing at about 100 percent, with 95 percent of the Fortune 500 using Canva somewhere in their organisations. The company also made its Affinity suite fully free in 2026, aiming it directly at Adobe’s professional design tools. That is a large, profitable, still-growing business — which is precisely why a 22 percent restructure is so striking. Companies in this position do not usually cut a fifth of their workforce unless they believe the model that got them here will not carry them forward.

6.2 Valuation, markdowns and the IPO question

Canva’s valuation has been on a round trip: a 40 billion dollar peak in 2021, investor markdowns to an implied figure near 13 billion dollars in 2023, then a recovery to 42 billion dollars in an August 2025 employee share sale — still below the 2021 peak on a far bigger revenue base. The recent markdowns toward the low-30 billion dollar range have pushed the question of a public listing further out. Blackbird Ventures, Australia’s largest venture capital firm and an early Canva backer, told its investors earlier this year that Canva was “ready” for a second-half 2026 listing, but Perkins has now indicated that a public listing is more likely next year than in 2026, a timeline that puts the company’s unit economics directly under investor scrutiny. At roughly 4 billion dollars in revenue and with a history of profitability, Canva would be among the most financially healthy technology IPOs in years whenever it does list — but the restructure suggests the company wants its cost base and its AI economics in better shape before it faces public markets.

7. Reactions and the impact in India

The announcement has already had visible effects beyond Sydney. In India, the layoffs have reached Canva’s India-focused content operations, with an executive who helped establish the company’s local design team and content library among those affected.

7.1 Staff reaction inside the company

Inside Canva, the reaction has been a mixture of shock and anger, according to people who spoke to reporters. The company’s 13-year record without a company-wide round of cuts meant many staff had no expectation of one, and the rumours circulating the day before the announcement gave little time to prepare. The anger reported around annual leave being counted inside the six months of salary shows how the details of a severance package are felt on the ground, even when the headline terms look generous. At the same time, the grants and the laptop provision have drawn praise from outside observers, and the company’s handling of the announcement — a published staff email, a named fund, a clear timetable of meetings — has been more transparent than the norm for technology layoffs.

7.2 India content operations affected

Mehek Malhotra, who served as India Content Lead at Canva, disclosed in a social media post that she was among those impacted by the layoffs. Her departure has brought attention to the potential implications for Canva’s India design, content and localisation functions, though the company has not announced any decision to discontinue India-specific content development or transfer its local creative functions to global teams. The number of employees affected in India, the functions impacted and the future structure of the design and localisation teams remain unconfirmed, as does any country-by-country breakdown across the 37 countries where Canva operates. For India, the open question is whether the restructure trims a local team that built content for one of Canva’s largest user bases, or whether the India operation continues largely intact under a new structure.

8. What remains unconfirmed and what to watch next

The most important fact about the Canva restructure is how much is still unknown. The company has confirmed the scale of the impact and the shape of the new organisation, but the details that determine how many people actually lose their jobs, and where, have not been disclosed.

8.1 The unanswered numbers

Canva has not said how many of the 1,271 affected people will leave, how many will be reassigned and how many will be asked to relocate. It has not given a country breakdown, so the impact in Australia, India and its other 35 countries is unconfirmed. It has not said which functions will shrink most, or how the merged Product organisation will be led. The exact redundancy count, the relocation numbers, the fate of specific teams and the company’s updated revenue outlook all remain unconfirmed, and the conflicting framings in early coverage — some calling it 1,271 layoffs, others correctly calling it 1,271 people affected — show how easily the headline figure can be misread. Until Canva publishes the breakdown, any claim about the number of job losses is an estimate, not a fact.

8.2 What to watch next

The next disclosures should clarify which functions will shrink, which roles will be combined and how many employees will be asked to relocate, and they are expected after the company-wide meeting on November 10 and the organisational meetings beginning November 11. Watch for the breakdown of the 1,271 figure, for any country-level numbers, for the leadership of the merged Product organisation, and for whether the December 14 deadline for Collective Fund registrations produces a visible wave of new ventures. Watch, too, for Canva’s next financial update: whether the restructure and the cheaper in-house models restore the growth forecast toward 30 percent, or whether the 20 percent figure becomes the new normal. And watch the IPO timetable — if Perkins’s hint that a listing is more likely next year hardens into a 2027 plan, the restructure will be remembered as the moment Canva chose to rebuild itself before facing public investors. For now, the confirmed facts are the scale, the date and the package; everything else is still to come, and the people inside the 1,271 will be waiting for the November meetings to learn where they stand.

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