Canva’s big layoffs say a lot about the AI design landscape
The AI design giant Canva just announced the first-ever major round of layoffs in its 13-year history. As part of the restructuring, 1,271 people—around 22% of the company’s overall staff—will either be laid off, asked to change roles, or relocate to the company’s headquarters in Sydney, Australia. News of the layoffs was announced on November 3 (a perfect day to bury some bad news) in a press…
Canva, the AI design giant, has just announced its first major round of layoffs in 13 years, affecting 1,271 employees—around 22% of the company's workforce. The restructuring was announced on November 3 by co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins, who explained that the layoffs were part of a larger plan to make Canva's teams more agile and less siloed.
Perkins expressed the need to "refound Canva" to return to small, empowered teams, focusing on what matters most for the community. Despite the layoffs, the company's growth remains significant, with over 265 million monthly active users and more than 31 million paid users. Canva's challenge lies in balancing its user base's demand for AI-powered products with the economic strain caused by the high cost of using frontier models.
The company has been working on developing first-party tools to reduce costs, but its revenue growth forecast for 2026 has been downgraded from 30% to 20%.
Written by urgent.news from Fast Company's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
