Layoffs

Canva’s Restructuring Reaches Its Profitable Vienna Unit

co-produced by AI04. November 2026, 10:06

The Canva app on a smartphone. © appshunter.io / Unsplash

Highly profitable and still not safe: The job cuts at the design giant Canva are reaching Austria. Worldwide, 1,271 roles are affected, or 22 percent of the workforce. Canva would not say how many of them are at Canva Austria GmbH in Vienna. “We’re not breaking the changes down by market,” the company told Trending Topics. “We reviewed every team the same way, including teams in local markets.”

Applying the company-wide rate of just over 20 percent, that would work out to 16 to 18 of the roughly 80 people the Vienna unit employed on average last year. Whether it will actually be that many remains unclear. For some of those affected, the changes also mean new roles or relocating to central hubs, according to Canva. Worldwide, departing employees will receive at least six months’ salary, including statutory entitlements.

Vienna Remains a Key A.I. Hub

Canva is not giving up on the location. “The Vienna campus is remaining a hub for Canva,” the company said, adding that it would keep investing in teams close to the customers and markets they serve.

The Vienna unit is no ordinary outpost for Canva. It traces back to Kaleido, a Viennese A.I. start-up founded in 2018 by Benjamin Grössing and David Fankhauser. Kaleido became known for remove.bg, a tool that uses A.I. to remove the background from photos. In 2021, Canva bought a 40 percent stake and later took over the start-up completely, in one of the largest exits in Austrian start-up history.

A Restructuring Without Cost Pressure

According to information obtained by Trending Topics, the cuts are not driven by financial pressure. Canva remains in a strong financial position and, despite slower growth, is on track to increase revenue 20 percent this year. 2026 marks its 10th consecutive year of profitability. The restructuring is meant to simplify how the company works, cut layers of management and give teams more ownership so Canva can move faster.

The roles being eliminated are not to be replaced by A.I. But A.I. is changing the kinds of products Canva builds, and with them how its teams are organized and which skills are needed. There are early signs of progress: Since Canva began rolling out its new A.I. offering in September, usage has roughly doubled. People who discover Canva through A.I. assistants convert to paid customers at nearly twice the average rate. In total, more than 250 million people use Canva every month.

€15 Million in Profit With 80 People

The management report for the 2025 fiscal year shows how Canva Austria GmbH is doing. The numbers are impressive:

Profit: Net income after taxes rose 54 percent to €14.9 million (2024: €9.7 million). Pretax profit climbed 20 percent to €18.5 million.
Margin: The EBITDA margin was 54 percent, up from 39 percent a year earlier. That works out to about €187,000 in after-tax profit per employee.
Revenue: Reported revenue fell slightly to €34.7 million. Only €12.1 million of that came from external customers, while €22.6 million was billed to other Canva companies.
Cushion: At the end of 2025, the company had about €62.3 million in the bank. Its equity ratio is 88 percent, and it has no bank loans.

The jump in profit came mainly from lower costs. Personnel expenses fell 38.5 percent to €11.6 million. According to the report, that was largely because of much lower share-based compensation costs after some employees left the company in early 2025 and their stock options lapsed. The average number of employees fell from 85 to about 80.

From Product Start-Up to Development Arm

The report also shows how the Vienna unit’s role is changing. At the end of 2025, Canva shut down unscreen.com, a service for removing backgrounds from videos, and designify.com. Remove.bg is now the only stand-alone product, with about 33.7 million monthly users. Annualized revenue from external customers stands at €12.0 million, slightly below the previous year.

Work for the group is becoming more important. More than half of the employees are software engineers specializing in A.I. and machine learning, and many of them work directly for the Australian parent, Canva Pty Ltd. Canva Austria is positioning itself as the group’s A.I. hub, the report says. Going forward, revenue from within the group is expected to grow the most.

Canva has just launched its first proprietary A.I. models, Craft and Brush, developed by its research unit, Canva Research. In image generation, Canva Research now ranks second worldwide, ahead of major A.I. labs including Meta, Microsoft and xAI. At the same time, Melanie Perkins, Canva’s chief executive, wants to merge teams, cut overlap and move more product teams to Sydney. What role the Vienna A.I. engineers will play in that remains unclear.

Pressure From Rivals

Competition in image editing has intensified. Adobe Express, Apple’s Photos app and countless free tools can now remove backgrounds as well, and image generators like ChatGPT create entire graphics from a prompt. The report itself warns that the strong growth of the A.I. market has sharply increased the number of competitors and intensified the pressure to innovate.