Canva is cutting 1,271 jobs, roughly 22% of its staff, after what its CEO calls the company’s hardest year. It is the first mass layoff at the Australian design platform in its 13 years.
Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins told employees that Canva’s growth has slowed this year, which she said had not happened in ten years. “Success in our first chapter doesn’t guarantee success in the next,” she wrote in a note to staff.
Beyond the job cuts, Canva is reorganising how it works. TechCrunch’s report on the note says the product, growth and platform teams are being merged so fewer people sit between an idea and its release. Employees will be expected to take on broader roles rather than narrow specialities, and Canva wants people back in the office on some days of the week.
The money side explains part of the squeeze. Canva has been building its own AI models to depend less on outside providers, but AI costs still pushed it to lower its revenue growth forecast to 20%, down from 30%. Some of its early investors had already revalued the company at roughly $35 billion earlier in 2026, a markdown.
Competition is the other pressure. ChatGPT and Gemini can now produce posters and slide decks from a prompt, which is the same job many people used to open Canva for.
Perkins described the platform as one used by hundreds of millions of people and thanked staff for the years of work behind it, while saying plainly that “this has been our hardest year yet”. Canva was founded in Australia and is best known for letting non-designers make social posts, presentations and posters from templates.
Canva has not said which teams or countries are affected beyond the company-wide figure, or how severance will work.
