Canva cuts 2026 revenue forecast by third, AI costs too high
Sydney-founded Canva slashed its 2026 revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20% after discovering the average cost of serving an AI task was unsustainable.
CEO Melanie Perkins told investors the US$42 billion company was "relying too heavily on frontier models" and had to slow product rollout while it rebuilt its AI architecture and pricing model.
"We decided to slow the rollout while we rebuilt the architecture, reduced unit costs and strengthened the business model," Perkins wrote in the Q2 update. "This slowed our distribution and impacted our near-term growth."
The numbers
Canva posted US$921.9 million revenue in the June quarter, up 25.2% year on year. The company now serves 265 million monthly active users and 31 million paying customers. ARR sits around US$3.5 billion to US$4 billion.
That growth rate is solid at scale, but below the ambitious 30% target Canva set at the start of the year.
AI economics
The company has since cut the cost of serving a single AI task by nearly 90% since April. Perkins said Canva's own style-transfer, image and video models are now materially cheaper than frontier alternatives.
This mirrors what other enterprise software companies are seeing: Atlassian recently capped employee AI spending as costs ballooned. The economics of GenAI at scale remain brutal, especially for companies shipping volume features to large user bases.
What it means for sales teams
If you are selling AI-enabled tools, expect CFOs to ask harder questions about unit economics and consumption models. "AI-first" is table stakes now, but buyers want to see the math on how you are controlling inference costs at scale.
Canva's move shows even well-funded companies with massive user bases are pulling back to get the economics right before scaling further. Worth noting if you are forecasting AI feature adoption in your own pipeline: usage might spike, but companies are increasingly building guardrails around runaway costs.
Canva remains Sydney-based with roughly 5,000 employees globally. The company is reportedly considering a Nasdaq listing.