Canva, the Australian design platform used by hundreds of millions of people, is restructuring a fifth of its workforce after its growth slowed for the first time in a decade. Chief executive Melanie Perkins told staff that 1,271 employees, about 22% of the company, will be affected, whether through job losses, changed roles or requests to relocate. She did not say how many jobs will be cut outright.
In a message to employees, Perkins wrote that “our growth has slowed for the first time in a decade,” and described this as the company’s hardest year so far. She said small adjustments would not be enough and that Canva had become inefficient as it grew.
The biggest change is structural. Canva is merging its product, growth and platform teams into a single product organisation, cutting layers of management and consolidating overlapping responsibilities. Perkins framed the goal as rebuilding the company around small teams with more freedom to make decisions. Staff will also be asked to take on broader roles, with less narrow specialisation.
More product teams will be based at the Sydney headquarters, and some employees will be asked to move. The company is also shifting to hybrid work, with staff expected in the office a few days a week.
Departing employees will receive at least six months’ pay, a year of health insurance, job-search support and a year of LinkedIn Premium, and they can keep their company laptops.
Why growth stalled
The slowdown has been building through the year. Canva earlier lowered its expected revenue growth to about 20%, down from 30%, and reports have tied that cut to the rising cost of running AI features. The company has been developing its own AI models to reduce costs and depend less on outside providers. Early investors reportedly marked its valuation down to around $35 billion earlier this year.
Competition has also changed. General-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini can now generate posters, social graphics and slides from a simple text prompt, the kind of quick design work that made Canva popular in the first place. Perkins’s message did not mention AI by name, saying only that new technology is changing what people create and what they expect from their tools.
Canva is still a large and, by its own account, cash-generative business. Last year it reported about 260 million monthly users and $3.5 billion in revenue, and executives have said it is profitable on a free cash flow basis. As a private company, it discloses far less than a listed firm would.
What it means here
Canva is one of the most widely used design tools in Bangladesh. Freelancers, small online sellers, marketing teams, teachers and students rely on it for social media posts, presentations and product images. The announcement did not include any change to plans or pricing, so for now users should see no difference.
The wider message is harder to ignore. Canva made professional-looking design cheap and easy, and AI tools are now doing the same to Canva. For Bangladesh’s large community of freelance designers, the value is moving from producing standard templates to judgment, branding and work that a prompt cannot easily replace.
For local software startups, Canva’s numbers carry a warning too. Even a profitable company with a quarter of a billion users found that AI features raised its costs faster than its revenue. Founders building AI into their products should price that in from day one.
