Over a thousand Canva employees will be affected by a restructuring, Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins told staff in a note.
The cuts follow a slowdown in growth for the first time in a decade. Canva has not given a breakdown of how many people will leave.
Perkins referred to it as the hardest moment in the company’s thirteen-year history, noting that new technology is changing what people create and that small changes would not be enough.
The plan is to re-orient Canva around smaller teams. Sydney will become the main home for product teams, and some staff will be asked to relocate.
Read: Moniepoint to cut engineering, product roles in major restructuring
They will get at least six months of salary, including statutory entitlements, regardless of location. The one-year vesting cliff is removed for people who joined in the past year.
Canva will also cover 12 months of healthcare where it currently provides it and 12 months of its Canva Care assistance programme, which extends to family members. Exiting employees get career coaching, interview preparation and a year of LinkedIn Premium.
A new Canva Collective Fund will give US$10,000 grants to leavers who want to start a business or do something meaningful for their community. They have until December 14 to register interest. Canva says it will take no ownership or equity in what they create.
Why Canva is cutting
Pressure has been building on Canva since August, when investors Blackbird and Airtree cut its valuation by $7.1 billion, from $42 billion to $34.9 billion, and its own internal valuation, which sets the price for employee share sales, fell from $38.9 billion to $31 billion.
Second-quarter revenue was $921.9 million, up 25.2% but below the company’s own guidance. Canva cut its expected growth rate by about a third, to roughly 20%. The Week reports that annualised revenue of $3.69 billion is well short of an internal target of $5.2 billion.
AI costs are a large part of the story. Perkins said demand for Canva’s AI tools significantly exceeded expectations, but running frontier models was too expensive to roll out widely. Canva slowed the rollout and rebuilt its architecture. It says the cost of each AI task has fallen by nearly 90% since Canva AI 2.0 launched in April.
This is not Canva’s first AI-linked cut. In March 2025, it laid off 10 of its 12 technical writers after staff had been told to use generative AI more.
What it could mean for Africa
The reports on the layoffs do not mention Africa, and it is not clear whether Canva’s African team is affected. Its footprint on the continent is small but growing. In November 2025, Canva opened an office in Rosebank, Johannesburg, staffed by nine people. It also added local currency pricing in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya and support for nearly 20 African languages.
No official figure for Canva’s African headcount was available.
Last updated: November 4, 2026
