Canva has downgraded its revenue forecast for 2026, cutting growth by a third, from 30% to 20%, with CEO Melanie Perkins telling investors that it was a \u201cdeliberate decision to get the economics right\u201d when it comes to the ballooning costs of artificial intelligence from the likes of OpenAI.<\/p>\n
In her Q2 CY2026 update to shareholders, Perkins said the \u201caverage cost of serving an AI task was too high\u201d \u2013 an issue companies such as Atlassian, which recently capped employee spending on AI, are dealing with as they also try to reposition as AI-first amid \u201cSAASpocalypse\u201d concerns, and falling share prices and valuations for software companies.<\/p>\n
But going hard at the cutting edge of AI came at a cost, and the design platform was \u201crelying too heavily on frontier models,\u201d Perkins explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeveral of our first-party models were not yet ready for release, and our pricing, consumption model and usage controls had not caught up with the outsized demand we were seeing,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
AI costs cut<\/p>\n
Canva, valued at US$42 billion (A$60bn), and pondering a Nasdaq listing, has developed in-house AI as it pushed AI products to the forefront with the launch of Canva AI 2.0 four months ago \u2013 with 2.1 now on the way.<\/p>\n
The good news is that revenue remains strong, growing by 25.2% on 12 months ago to hit US$921.9m (A$1.32bn) in the June quarter.<\/p>\n
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By continuing, you agree to our\u00a0Terms & Conditions<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile 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,\u201d Perkins wrote to investors, explaining that productroll out was slowed to get the underlying economics right.<\/p>\n \u201cWe decided to slow the rollout while we rebuilt the architecture, reduced unit costs and strengthened the business model,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cThis slowed our distribution and impacted our near-term growth, but it also enabled some of the most important technical advances in Canva\u2019s history and put us in a much stronger position to scale AI sustainably.\u201d<\/p>\n