Canva Cuts 22% of Staff as AI Costs Squeeze Growth

Canva is cutting 22% of its workforce, or 1,271 people, according to TechCrunch, which reported the figures on 4 November 2026.

The company said its growth has slowed for the first time in a decade. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins leads the company, which is restructuring its organization in response. Affected staff will lose their jobs, change roles, or relocate to central hubs, per Business Times and The Guardian. Canva has described the job cuts as part of a major restructure and reorganization, a description also used by Business Insider.

The structural changes go beyond headcount. Canva is merging its product, growth and platform teams to reduce communication friction between them. It is also reducing subspecialisation, so employees will take on more responsibilities than their current roles define. On working arrangements, the company is moving toward hybrid work, asking staff to come into an office a few days a week.

The financial pressure behind the restructure is laid out in the company's revised guidance. Canva has cut its revenue growth forecast to 20% from 30%, a change the company tied to ballooning AI costs. Canva has been shipping its own AI models to reduce those costs and its reliance on third-party models. Earlier this year, its early investors cut the company's valuation to about $35 billion.

The broader context here is a familiar one for software companies whose products run inference (the computing a model performs each time it answers a request) on every user action. Inference costs money in much the way a printer costs money per page: the more people print, the more ink is used, whatever the revenue from each sheet. Compute spend scales with usage, so a company can grow its user base and still see its margins narrow. A forecast that falls by a third leaves less room to absorb that spend, and the cost pressure shows up quickly in headcount decisions.

Building proprietary models is a common response, because it gives a company direct control over unit costs and over its model roadmap. It also shifts training and serving work onto the company's own engineers. Canva's decision to pair that shift with a flatter, more generalist structure suggests the company expects fewer, broader roles to carry more of the work.

In my view, the question that matters most for Canva's users and staff is whether a leaner, more integrated organization can turn AI features into revenue that covers their cost. The restructure makes that bet explicit. The next signals will appear in the company's growth numbers and forecasts, and in whether the in-house models lower the cost of serving the features people already use.