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Canva has announced the acquisition of Simtheory and Ortto, as part of its continued investment in artificial intelligence and marketing infrastructure, according to a report by TechCrunch. Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.
Both companies were founded by Chris and Mike Sharkey, previously behind vacation rental platform Stayz, which was acquired by Fairfax Media. The founders are set to join Canva in leadership roles spanning the company’s AI and marketing technology divisions.
The acquisitions are expected to strengthen Canva’s capabilities across agentic AI, data infrastructure, marketing automation and customer engagement, as the company seeks to evolve beyond its origins as a design platform into a more comprehensive workflow system. The integration of these technologies is aimed at enabling teams to manage the entire lifecycle of content and campaigns, from ideation through to execution, scaling and performance measurement.
Simtheory’s platform enables teams to deploy AI assistants tailored to business needs, allowing them to operate across tools and execute real-world tasks. The platform supports the application of advanced AI models across a variety of use cases and facilitates the creation of agent-driven workflows.
Ortto, meanwhile, combines a customer data platform with marketing automation tools, allowing businesses to design and manage customer journeys across channels including email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms and surveys within a single system. Canva stated that Ortto’s event-driven architecture and no-code integrations simplify real-time data connectivity and activation. The platform currently serves more than 11,000 customers across 190 countries.
Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht stated in a press release that the addition of Simtheory accelerates Canva’s transition from a design platform enhanced by AI tools to an AI-first platform with design and productivity capabilities at its core, while Ortto strengthens its ability to support the full marketing and content lifecycle through Canva Grow, the company’s tool for asset creation and performance measurement.
The latest deals form part of a broader acquisition push by Canva. Two weeks prior, the company acquired digital out-of-home advertising startup Doohly. Six weeks earlier, it announced the dual acquisition of Cavalry and MangoAI. This followed its acquisition of marketing intelligence platform MagicBrief in January 2025.
Canva closed 2025 with annualised revenue of $4 billion, supported by a user base of more than 265 million, including 31 million paid users. The company also reported a 20 per cent increase in monthly active users over the period.
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