Canva’s AI reckoning is forcing Melanie Perkins to rethink the company from the ground up
Fortune · Emma Hinchliffe ·
Canva's layoffs of 22% of its workforce came with a public overhaul of how the tech company operates.
For more than a decade, Canva has been on a near-unstoppable growth trajectory. The startup found product-market fit as a democratizer of design that put previously hard-to-learn tools in the hands of the masses—just as the advent of social media and video demanded it. Its user growth soared. Even as a high-growth startup, it started turning a profit five years in. Under cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins, Canva became the highest-valued female-founded and -led startup in the world.
But the past year has been a test of Canva’s once-guaranteed success. AI has been battering software businesses and Canva has had to slash its growth forecast. Its been hit by a double-whammy—the cost of providing AI features that users now demand, and users’ ability to use other AI tools to create visual assets they once turned to Canva for.
Earlier this week, Canva laid off or asked to relocate 22% of its workforce, or about 1,200 people. In a long, wrenching note to staff, Perkins called it “without doubt the hardest moment in our 13-year history.” While layoffs seem par for the course at most tech firms these days, Canva had so far avoided a reduction in force of this scale.