Canva's 22% shake-up: what revenue per employee says about it

Canva is not reshaping 22% of its company because it carried more people per dollar than its rivals. On its own disclosed numbers it already brought in more per head than Figma and nearly as much as Adobe. Co-founder and chief executive Melanie Perkins told staff on November 3 that 1,271 people, or 22% of Canva, would be affected, a change Bloomberg reported the same day. Canva published her full note.

Our take: this is a slower-growing company deciding it can no longer run the org chart of a fast-growing one, and the memo says so plainly. Several reports led on severance, and some tied the cut to AI costs, yet the note never uses the word AI. She writes about structure, layers and location, and about growth that "has slowed for the first time in a decade".

Why reshape a fifth of a growing company? The plan it was staffed for changed. In August, Fortune reported that Canva had cut its expected revenue growth rate by a third to 20% after AI features cost more to deliver than expected.

The revenue-per-employee math

Canva is private, so the numbers come from what it has said. Co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch in February that annual recurring revenue reached $4 billion by the end of 2025. Canva has not published a headcount, but the memo's two figures imply one: 1,271 is 22% of about 5,777 people. As 22% is rounded, the range is about 5,650 to 5,910.

Sources: Adobe 10-K (fiscal 2025, staff at November 28, 2025); Figma 10-K (2025, staff at December 31, 2025); Canva ARR at the end of 2025 per Obrecht, headcount implied by the memo. SaasBuzz calculation.

Two cautions. ARR is a run rate, not booked revenue, and the $4 billion figure is ten months old. And the "after" row assumes all 1,271 leave, which the memo does not say: "For some people, this will mean changes to their roles or being asked to relocate to centralised hubs."

Even the ceiling falls short of the bar SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin set in a reply under his own post about the cut, where he put the rough goal at $1 million per employee for a scaling company:

On the same $4 billion, $1 million a head would mean about 4,000 people, a cut of about 31% from the implied base. Lemkin argued in another reply that "almost all layoffs are too small to achieve their goals". On this math Canva's is one, unless revenue grows into the smaller team.

What the memo says that coverage skipped

Read whole, the note is a reorganisation plan with job losses inside it:

• One product organisation. Product, Growth and Platform merge, to cut "handovers and coordination".

• Fewer specialists. Canva is "reducing subspecialisation and collapsing layers".

• Sydney first. Sydney "will become the primary home for more of our product teams".

• Back to the office. From January most hybrid staff are expected in "around 2 to 3 days" a week.

• The word she chose. Perkins says Canva needs to "refound" itself around "small, empowered teams".

The strongest objection to our reading is that the silence on AI is cosmetic: the forecast cut was about AI costs, and a smaller payroll frees money for computing. Fair, but the memo's own case is coordination, not automation. Pipedrive's chief executive drew a similar line five days earlier, blaming AI search for lost traffic while saying his cuts were not about AI doing employees' work.

How does it compare with other 2026 software cuts?

Canva's share is large for a company that is still growing. Atlassian said in March it would shed about 1,600 jobs, around 10% of a workforce of about 16,000, according to Startup Daily, "to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales". Pipedrive proposed on October 29 to cut 267 of its 380 roles in Estonia, 70% of its staff there, as SaasBuzz reported. Unlike either, Canva's 22% counts moves and role changes as well as exits.

Is this about AI tools replacing Canva?

Some customers say so. Lemkin, an investor who runs SaaStr, posted a day before his thread on the cut that his team had stopped using Canva about a year ago while still paying for it:

One customer is not a trend; Canva reported more than 265 million monthly active users in 2025. But the memo concedes the pressure in general terms: "New technology is transforming what people can create, how they create it, and what they expect from the products they use."

What do departing staff get, and what happens next?

According to the memo, everyone leaving gets at least six months of salary, inclusive of statutory entitlements; 12 months of healthcare where Canva provides it; the one-year vesting cliff removed for those who joined in the past year; and their Canva MacBook. Canva is also offering US$10,000 grants to departing staff who start something of their own, taking no equity. A company all-hands follows on November 10.

For customers, the memo promises no product change. Watch whether one product organisation ships faster.