Canva's Growth Slowed for the First Time in a Decade. It's Reworking 22% of Its Staff.

Canva CEO Melanie Perkins told staff on November 3 that 1,271 people, about 22% of the company, will be affected by job cuts, role changes or relocation. She posted the note on Canva's newsroom.

It's Canva's first round of job cuts, according to The Information, as summarized by The Next Web.

Perkins said growth had slowed for the first time in a decade. Canva is still growing about 25% a year, just slower than it planned. The reasons go back to August.

What Canva is changing

The note makes three changes. Canva is merging its Product, Growth and Platform teams into one Product Org. It's cutting management layers and folding narrow, specialist jobs into broader ones. And it's making Sydney the main base for more product teams, asking some staff to move there.

At a product-led growth (PLG) company like Canva, where the product does most of the selling, those three teams split the work. Product builds the features. Platform keeps them running. Growth owns the path from free sign-up to paid plan: onboarding, upgrade prompts and pricing tests.

Perkins's stated reason is coordination. She points to narrow ownership, too many handoffs between the three teams and "new technology." She doesn't mention AI or pricing.

The August forecast cut

Three months earlier, Canva gave a different explanation for its slowdown. In its second-quarter shareholder letter, as Startup Daily reported, Canva cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20%.

Perkins said Canva had leaned too heavily on frontier models, the largest and most expensive AI models from outside labs. She also said its pricing, consumption model and usage controls hadn't kept up with demand for AI features. She called the lower forecast a "deliberate decision to get the economics right."

The same letter showed a healthy company. Q2 revenue was $921.9 million, up 25.2%, and the cost of each AI task was down 90%. Canva has been profitable for nine years and had $1.47 billion in cash. All of these figures are company-stated. Canva is private and doesn't publish audited results.

Investors still repriced it. Blackbird and Airtree, two early backers, marked Canva down 17% to $34.9 billion, from a $42 billion peak.

How AI changes who owns pricing

For most software, a free user costs almost nothing to serve. A feature can stay free for a year while the growth team tests where the paywall goes.

AI features work differently. Every image, rewrite or generation has a serving cost, which is the bill for the computing power behind it. So a free AI feature becomes a cost that grows with every new user.

Fixing that takes three things: a usage cap in the product, a choice of which model handles which request, and a price for heavy users. At Canva, those decisions sat with three teams. The cap was a product call, the model choice a platform call and the price a growth call.

Canva has already made some of those moves. Ben Murray, who writes The SaaS CFO, describes Canva routing free-tier AI to its own models and selling an AI Pass, reported at $100 per user per month. That price comes from press reports of the shareholder letter.

Perkins's note never connects the August problem to the merger, so that link is our reading. Still, the merger puts the cap, the model choice and the price under one leader.

There's a simpler reading too. Cutting layers and moving roles to Sydney save money whatever the stated reason. And Perkins says Canva has tried to fix those handoffs for years, so the complaint is older than the AI bill.

What comes next

Canva's next shareholder letter will show whether the 20% forecast holds. It will also be the first to report results under the merged Product Org.

Perkins is due to address staff at an all-hands on November 10, TechCity reported.

So a free AI feature becomes a cost that grows with every new user.

Perkins addresses staff at an all-hands on November 10, a week after the note went out.

By Business of GTM