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By Amanda Greenwood
Associate News Editor
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Canva has unveiled an unusually generous exit package for workers leaving the design software company as part of a major restructuring effort that will affect more than one-fifth of its workforce.
The Australian-founded company announced on Tuesday, November 3 that 1,271 employees, equivalent to 22 percent of Canva’s workforce, will be affected by the changes.
Some employees will lose their jobs, while others might have their roles changed or be asked to relocate. The company hasn’t yet disclosed exactly how many people will ultimately leave.
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Newsweek has contacted Canva for comment and is awaiting a response.
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The changes come during what co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins described as Canva's "hardest year yet," with the company's growth slowing for the first time in a decade.
But, alongside the scale of the restructuring, attention has also turned to the support being offered to those leaving.
Canva’s Extensive Exit Package
Every departing employee will receive at least six months' salary, including their statutory rights, regardless of where they’re based. Employees who have been at Canva for less than a year won’t lose any shares or equity simply because they were laid off before their first anniversary.
Workers will receive 12 months of continued healthcare coverage and a year of access to Canva Care, its Employee Assistance Program (EAP), which also covers family members.
Departing workers will receive one-on-one career coaching, interview preparation, and a year of LinkedIn Premium. The company is assigning part of its Talent Acquisition team to help affected workers review resumes and practice for interviews, while an opt-in alumni directory will be shared with investors, partners, and industry contacts.
Employees leaving the company can also keep their Canva-issued MacBooks.
Perhaps the most unusual element is the new Canva Collective Fund. Departing employees can apply for $10,000 grants if they want to start a business or pursue a project benefiting their local community. Canva said it will take no ownership or equity in anything created through the initiative.
The package has attracted mainly positive attention. Jasveer Singh, the co-founder and CEO of KnotDating, called it "a master-class in how to handle layoffs." He said the Canva CEO's announcement was "thoughtful, honest and generous." Mark Di Stefano, Rear Window editor at The Australian Financial Review, called the package "exceedingly generous."
Despite the praise, some users, such as socialistMAD, have been skeptical: "There will be fine print if your business starts to gross a certain amount they will come back for something…All of that really gives you no security." The user alluded to the fact that 6 months' worth of salary is unlikely to be enough in the current job climate.
Why Is Canva Cutting Jobs?
Perkins said that the restructuring is designed to simplify a business that has become increasingly fragmented as it has grown.
To do this, Canva plans to combine its Product, Growth, and Platform operations into a single Product organization. The company will also reduce management layers and combine roles with overlapping responsibilities while giving individual teams greater end-to-end ownership.
Although the announcement gives an indication of what types of jobs might be vulnerable and exposed to the mass shake-up, Canva hasn’t officially published a breakdown of layoffs by job title, department, or country.
Perkins also said Sydney would become the primary home for more product teams and other roles, which is why it might be asking some to consider relocating.
Is AI Behind the Canva Layoffs?
Artificial intelligence perhaps provides some important context for the restructuring. However, Canva hasn’t specifically said that AI will be replacing the laid-off workers.
All Perkins has said is that "new technology is transforming what people can create, how they create it, and what they expect from the products they use." She also pointed to slowing growth and the company's organizational structure. Perkins didn’t explicitly attribute the layoffs to AI or say jobs were being automated.
However, the restructuring arrives as Canva dramatically increases its investment in AI.
In April, the company announced Canva AI 2.0, which it described as its "most significant product evolution" since the company launched in 2013. The system uses AI to generate layered, editable designs from prompts and includes agentic workflows that can complete tasks such as web research, scheduling, and coding.
More recently, in October, Canva unveiled Craft. This was the first image-generation foundation model developed in-house by its own AI Lab, Canva Research. The company said the technology was designed to make the generation of sophisticated AI designs faster and cheaper at an enormous scale.
Last week, it also announced Canva Brush, an AI model capable of understanding and editing designs. Canva said Brush was up to 69 percent faster on general design-editing tasks and 46 percent cheaper per editing task than its previous design agent.
That makes AI part of the wider backdrop to Canva's attempt to become a leaner business. But the company's stated reasons for the restructuring are broader: slowing growth, excessive organizational complexity, fragmented ownership, changing technology and a desire to return to smaller teams with greater autonomy.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: John Fitzpatrick and James Debens
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