Canva Job Cuts Reach 1,271 People Without Saying How Many Lose Their Jobs

The Canva job cuts carry a number, 1,271. That is how many people, 22 per cent of the company, Melanie Perkins said would be affected by the restructure in a note to staff posted on Canva’s website on 3 November. Perkins called it the hardest moment in the company’s thirteen-year history, and apologised for the pain and disruption it would cause. The number does not say how many of them are losing their jobs. It counts three different fates together, and Canva has not separated them.

For some people, the note says, the changes will mean a different role. Others will be asked to relocate to centralised hubs. Others will leave. Perkins describes the order the decisions were made in: the mission and the goals for the next chapter first, then the structures, skills and locations those goals need, and only then what that means for individual roles. She adds that the decisions are not a reflection of the talent or contributions of the people affected.

The note is most specific about the people leaving. Everyone leaving gets at least six months’ salary, including statutory entitlements, wherever they are based. The one-year vesting cliff goes for people who joined in the past year. Healthcare continues for twelve months where Canva provides it, and the employee assistance programme, Canva Care, continues for the same period and covers family members.

Career help runs to one-on-one coaching, interview preparation and a year of LinkedIn Premium. A significant part of the talent acquisition team is assigned to resumes and interview practice. Departing staff can join an alumni talent directory Canva will share with investors, partners and its wider network, and they keep their Canva MacBook. A separate fund, the Canva Collective Fund, offers US$10,000 grants to departing staff who want to start something of their own, a business or a community project. Registration closes on 14 December, and Canva takes no ownership or equity in what they build.

Sydney becomes the primary home for more product teams, and for roles in other areas where shared context and close collaboration matter most. The global team stays where being close to the community, customers and markets matters more. From January, most hybrid staff will spend around two to three days a week in the office, depending on what suits their area. Canva’s teams work across 37 countries, so the conversations and the timing will differ by local rules. People leaving keep access to Slack and Gmail until the end of the week, so they can choose when and how to share the news with their teams. The company holds an all-hands meeting on 10 November, with meetings for each organisation from 11 November.

The restructure arrives about three months after Canva told shareholders its growth forecast had changed. The company cut its expected annual revenue growth from 30 per cent to 20 per cent, after quarterly revenue rose 25 per cent year on year to $921.9 million. Perkins said in the shareholder letter that the broader rollout of Canva AI had been deliberately delayed. The economics of serving AI requests at scale were not sustainable, she said. The company had relied too heavily on frontier models. Its own first-party models were not ready, and its pricing and usage controls had not caught up with demand. Canva spent three months rebuilding its AI infrastructure around its own models. The cost of processing a single AI task has since fallen by almost 90 per cent, Perkins said, with its style-transfer model 23 times cheaper than comparable frontier models, its image model 30 times cheaper and its video model 17 times cheaper.

The cheaper models were already arriving when the restructure was announced. Canva unveiled Craft, its first image-generation model, on 22 October, and Brush, a vision-language model for editing designs, on 29 October. Brush was built by Canva Research, a 160-person lab, from a leading open-weights model post-trained on real design and editing tasks. Canva says Brush runs up to 69 per cent faster on general design editing tasks. It costs 46 per cent less per edit than the design agent it replaced. Both figures come from Canva’s own internal testing. The model is available first to Canva Pro subscribers. Canva’s own explanation for building it is cost: with hundreds of millions of people creating billions of designs, a few extra cents per task adds up quickly.

In 2023, Canva’s global head of people said the company had no plans to lay off any staff and had avoided mass layoffs through its first decade, pointing to an internal-mobility team that had moved about 60 people into new roles. In March 2025, 10 of its 12 technical writers were made redundant, according to the Australian Financial Review. Staff told the paper they had followed the company’s direction to use generative AI tools and had previously been told that rising AI use would not lead to layoffs. Canva said at the time that the redundancies were not presented internally as a result of AI use. When The Australian reported a restructuring affecting Leonardo.AI’s 150 staff, Canva called suggestions of job losses categorically false and said all staff would be retained.

Staff heard the November news before the note arrived. Capital Brief reported on 2 November, citing two employees familiar with internal discussions, that rumours were circulating about another round of redundancies in November or a hiring freeze. Canva had not confirmed either. Earlier, co-founder Cliff Obrecht had compared Canva’s product-development pace with Anthropic’s and, according to Capital Brief, told staff that unless Canva worked at that velocity it would not stay competitive.

The two reactions from ordinary users that could be verified on Threads read the announcement as AI replacing the work itself. Chris K (@crk365) wrote: “Canva cuts nearly a quarter of their work force. Most of their services can now be achieved with a free AI chatbot”. Jon Weaving (@jonweavingauthor), who designs his own book covers, wrote: ‘Canva is suffering because of AI and I think that’s only going to make it harder for all of us “amateur” designers trying to do our covers WITHOUT AI.’ Neither reading matches what the company’s own documents say. The memo does not blame AI for taking roles, and the August letter blames the cost of serving AI, not its capability, for slowing growth. The missing split is the one figure that would show which reading the 1,271 supports. The March 2025 writers are the closer precedent: people who used the AI tools as directed and lost their roles anyway, after being told AI use would not lead to layoffs. Both Threads posts went up on 3 November, the day the note was published.

Canva was valued at $42 billion. Its cash stood at US$1.47 billion at the end of the June quarter, according to Startup Daily’s reporting. The company ended 2025 with more than 265 million monthly active users and more than 31 million paid users, according to figures Startup Daily reported. Canva has said it is considering a Nasdaq listing.