Canva layoffs: Over 1,200 staff to lose job, CEO Melanie Perkins calls it 'hardest moment in our 13-year history'
Canva Inc. announced job cuts and a sweeping overhaul affecting more than one-fifth of its workforce, as artificial intelligence (AI) forces a structural reckoning at one of Australia’s highest-profile technology companies.
Some 1,271 people, or 22 percent of Canva’s staff, will lose their jobs, change roles or relocate to central hubs, Chief Executive Officer Melanie Perkins was quoted by Bloomberg as saying in a note to employees that was posted on the firm’s website Wednesday.
The sweeping changes at Canva, an online design and publishing platform, mirror the broader upheaval across the software industry.
Investors have wiped billions of dollars from the value of these firms amid concerns new technology like Anthropic PBC’s Claude will cannibalise their business.
Artificial intelligence is allowing people to do more on their own without specialty programs, while companies are using AI to operate with fewer workers.
“New technology is transforming what people can create, how they create it, and what they expect from the products they use,” Perkins wrote in the note. “I’ve come to the difficult conclusion that small changes won’t be enough.”
Perkins, who co-founded Canva with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, didn’t specify how many staff would lose their jobs. But after the Sydney-based firm’s growth slowed for the first time in a decade, Perkins said Canva needs to become a simpler business and return to running small, empowered teams.
There will be fewer niche specialisations, she said.
She described the reorganisation as “the hardest moment in our 13-year history.”
Sydney will become the main base for more of Canva’s product teams. Perkins said more people will work face-to-face, and most hybrid staff will spend two to three days in the office a week from January.
Canva has been preparing for a potential listing, and the overhaul leaves the company in a delicate financial balance.
In 2008, Melanie Perkins, founder-CEO of Sydney-based Canva, found that at a time when Facebook was taking off — people could jump in and use that so easily — clunky design tools took years of training to learn.
"I wanted to make design software simple, online and collaborative," Perkins had earlier recalled in a medium post.
At the age of 19, Perkins became business partners with Cliff Obrecht and the duo started their first design platform, Fusion Books. Then in 2013, Cameron Adams joined the team and the three launched Canva to make it easier for people to design, be it logos, posters or business cards. Users can upload photos or select stock images and use preset filters and fonts to customize designs.
After hitting a $40 billion high in 2021, Canva’s valuation tumbled to roughly $26 billion a year later during a broad tech selloff. While Canva’s dollar worth subsequently rebounded, the effect of more recent tumult is not yet clear.
While the AI era has led to widespread job losses, investors are also questioning when, or even if, the vast associated investments will deliver a financial dividend.
(Bloomberg)
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