Canva Expands AI and Marketing Infrastructure Through Strategic Acquisitions
Canva has revealed its acquisition of Simtheory and Ortto, bolstering its ongoing commitment to enhancing artificial intelligence and marketing frameworks, as reported by TechCrunch. The financial specifics of these transactions remain undisclosed.
Founded by the Sharkey brothers, Chris and Mike, who previously developed the vacation rental platform Stayz—later acquired by Fairfax Media—the newcomers will assume pivotal roles within Canva, overseeing the company’s artificial intelligence and marketing technology sectors.
These acquisitions are anticipated to augment Canva’s proficiency in agentic AI, data architecture, marketing automation, and customer engagement.
This strategic evolution seeks to transform Canva from its foundational role as a design-centric platform into a more holistic workflow system.
The integration of these technologies aims to empower teams to navigate the complete content and campaign lifecycle, encompassing everything from initial concept development to execution, scaling, and performance analytics.
Simtheory’s innovative platform equips teams with the capability to deploy AI assistants tailored specifically to their business requirements, facilitating cross-tool operation and execution of complex real-world tasks.
This platform champions the use of advanced AI models across a spectrum of applications, thereby streamlining the establishment of agent-driven workflows.
Ortto, on the other hand, synergistically combines a customer data platform with marketing automation capabilities, empowering businesses to architect and manage customer journeys across diverse channels such as email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms, and surveys—all through a singular, cohesive system.
Canva has noted that Ortto’s event-driven architecture, coupled with no-code integrations, simplifies the real-time connectivity and activation of data, currently servicing more than 11,000 clients internationally across 190 countries.
Canva co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Cliff Obrecht, articulated in a press release that the integration of Simtheory expedites Canva’s metamorphosis from a purely design-driven platform—enhanced by AI—to an AI-centric platform where design and productivity functionalities are centrally embedded.
Furthermore, Ortto fortifies the company’s capability to support the comprehensive marketing and content lifecycle via Canva Grow, a vital tool for asset creation and performance evaluation.
These latest ventures align with Canva’s broader acquisition strategy. Merely two weeks prior, the company acquired digital out-of-home advertising innovator Doohly.
Six weeks earlier, it executed the dual acquisition of Cavalry and MangoAI. This followed its acquisition of the marketing intelligence platform MagicBrief in January 2025.
Canva concluded 2025 with an impressive annualized revenue of $4 billion, bolstered by a user community exceeding 265 million, which includes over 31 million paid subscribers. The company also reported a significant 20 percent increase in monthly active users during this period.
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