Canva was the rare startup that grew fast and made money—then AI costs slashed its growth forecast by a third

Canva cut its expected revenue growth rate by a third to 20% after the cost of delivering AI features came in far higher than anticipated, per Fortune. The design-software company slowed its AI rollout to rebuild the underlying architecture and repair the economics, CEO and co-founder Melanie Perkins confirmed to Fortune over email.

Perkins said user demand for Canva's new AI features "significantly exceeded" expectations — validating the product, but exposing a cost problem. "Rather than broadly rolling out a product before the underlying economics were ready, we decided to slow the rollout while we rebuilt the architecture, reduced unit costs and strengthened the business model," she told Fortune. She added that since launching Canva AI 2.0 in April — an agentic upgrade to the platform — the company has reduced the cost per task by nearly 90%. The challenge: users of the new version are creating three times as many designs as they did on the prior version, keeping pressure on margins.

Canva has spent years as an outlier in high-growth startup circles, combining rapid expansion with profitability. AI is now central to its push beyond design into enterprise workflows; the company has added tools including Canva Code as it seeks to compete in broader workplace software, as Fortune previously reported. The revenue downgrade — reported earlier by the Australian Financial Review — marks the first time that AI investment has visibly dented the company's financial outlook.

The pattern is not unique to Canva. Figma, its closest public-market parallel, disclosed its own AI trade-off: its free-cash-flow margin fell to 14% in the second quarter from 27% in the first, and the company is forecasting third-quarter revenue growth of 36%, a deceleration from 48% in the June quarter. Derek Hernandez, PitchBook's senior research analyst covering the intersection of SaaS and AI, told Fortune that Canva and Figma are the "biggest signals" that AI is breaking the traditional SaaS model. "AI is making SaaS no longer a zero marginal cost solution, which has really been what I would call a lot of software's secret sauce up until now," he said. He noted the two companies "hit the same wall about five days apart, but cited it in different places" — slower growth for Canva, margin compression for Figma.

The cost reset carries particular weight given Canva's IPO timeline. Fortune reported last year that an employee share sale valued Canva at $42 billion, and experts said at the time the company could go public in 2026. Hernandez now told Fortune that Canva may be targeting a listing next year instead, and that by slowing the AI rollout the company is signaling caution toward future public investors. "I'm sure they're trying to protect their profitability, especially if they want to go to public investors," he said.