Canva may announce another round of layoffs in November, report claims; hiring freeze also possible

Canva may announce another round of layoffs this month or impose a complete hiring freeze, according to a report by Capital Brief, which cited two employees familiar with the matter. “There are rumours currently circulating internally about another round of redundancies in November or a possible hiring freeze,” the employees reportedly told the publication.

The report comes months after Canva reportedly laid off 32 employees, including a significant portion of its technical content writing team, on March 29, 2025. The company also confirmed the earlier job cuts to Capital Brief.

“After thoughtful consideration, we are evolving our technical content writing function to better align with how our engineering teams create and maintain documentation,” Canva reportedly said in a statement. “As our ways of working continue to evolve, we’ve been empowering engineers to take greater ownership of documentation while incorporating new tools to support this process.”


Canva has been asked whether the new tools mentioned in its statement involved the use of artificial intelligence (AI) models. The company said it would try to place affected employees in other roles wherever possible. Those who could not be redeployed would be offered “generous financial packages to assist with their next steps”.

Canva co-founder’s message fuelled layoff fears

Earlier this year, a message from Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht reportedly fuelled concerns about further job cuts. According to Capital Brief, Obrecht, while comparing Canva's product development pace with that of AI company Anthropic, said: “If we are not working at this velocity we are not going to be competitive.”

Meanwhile, data from TrueUp.io suggests that job cuts continue to affect the technology sector. So far in 2026, 679 tech companies have announced layoffs, affecting 198,882 employees, or an average of 650 workers per day.

In 2025, 783 tech companies announced layoffs affecting 245,953 employees, averaging 674 job cuts per day, according to the platform.

Canva, however, has not officially announced another round of layoffs or confirmed the reported possibility of a hiring freeze.

Canva's growth and AI ambitions

The reported job-cut concerns come despite Canva ending 2025 with strong user growth. The company said it had more than 265 million monthly active users and over 31 million paid users during the year, marking a 20% increase in monthly active users.

However, according to a report by Startup Daily, Canva has lowered its revenue growth forecast for 2026 by a third, from 30% to 20%.

Valued at US$42 billion (A$60 billion), Canva is also considering a Nasdaq listing. The company has been placing artificial intelligence at the centre of its product strategy, developing in-house AI capabilities and expanding its AI-powered offerings with the launch of Canva AI 2.0. Version 2.1 is reportedly in the pipeline.

In a message to investors, Canva CEO Melanie Perkins acknowledged that the revised growth forecast was below the company's initial expectations.

“While this is strong growth at our scale, we want to acknowledge it is below the ambitious goal we set at the beginning of the year,” Perkins wrote.

She said the company had slowed its product rollout to improve the underlying economics of its AI offerings.

“We decided to slow the rollout while we rebuilt the architecture, reduced unit costs and strengthened the business model,” she wrote.

“This slowed our distribution and impacted our near-term growth, but it also enabled some of the most important technical advances in Canva’s history and put us in a much stronger position to scale AI sustainably.”

Despite the revised forecast, Canva has remained profitable for nine years. It ended the June quarter with US$1.47 billion in cash, Startup Daily reported.