Online course creation platform Thinkific is cutting a large chunk of its staff as the company moves to focus more on enterprise customers.
The news: The Vancouver-based firm announced it had eliminated 96 employees’ positions in a company-wide reorganization on Wednesday night.
The cuts represent a 30-percent reduction of Thinkific’s workforce, distributed across its global team, CEO Greg Smith told BetaKit in an email. He did not say how many Canadian employees were affected.
The cuts affected most of the company’s departments, with less impact on its customer-serving teams, Smith said. He explained that the layoffs were concentrated in areas built to support a broader, lower-growth market that Thinkific is stepping back from.
Smith told BetaKit in an email that Thinkific is stepping away from “very small businesses,” and that it will still serve its 35,000 small and medium-sized business customers. He added that the company sees these changes as beneficial to all of its customers—as it meets the bigger demands of larger customers, all customers get the product improvements.
From the source: “Our legacy … business isn’t showing the same growth trajectory, and it doesn’t make sense to continue investing at the same level there,” Smith said. “This wasn’t about AI or purely about cost. The financial benefit is real and healthy for the business, but it’s an outcome of the strategy, not the reason for it.”
Smith added that the cut “was a meaningful decision we didn’t take lightly.”
The context: Founded in 2012, Thinkific provides the tools for business customers to create their own online learning courses. It trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol $THNC. The company says it has more than 35,000 customers, including GoDaddy, Nasdaq, and the University of Oxford.
The decision to restructure was made after seeing “consistent proof” that its strategic shift to larger customers and deals was working, Smith claimed. He noted that Thinkific recently added a top-20 American bank and one of the largest media companies in the world to its customer roster.
Final thought: Thinkific said it expects the cuts to cost around $5 million USD ($7 million CAD), but ultimately generate approximately $19 million USD in gross annualized cost savings. Investors reacted positively to the news, with $THNC jumping 70 percent, from $1.20 CAD per share at market close on Wednesday to $2.10 CAD per share by press time.
CLARIFICATION (10/06/2026): Thinkific reached out after this story was originally published to clarify that the layoffs were focused on areas of the business that supported “very small businesses,” as opposed to SMBs. This story has been updated to reflect that clarification.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Jaykumar Bherwani.