Canva is doubling down on artificial intelligence and marketing technology with two fresh acquisitions: Simtheory, an AI collaboration and agent management platform, and Ortto, a customer data and marketing automation company. Canva didn’t share the financial details, but the message is clear: the company is investing heavily in AI-powered workflows and the infrastructure needed to help teams plan, create, launch, and measure campaigns in one place.
Both Simtheory and Ortto were founded by brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey, who previously founded vacation rental service Stayz (later acquired by Fairfax Media). The duo is now heading to Canva, where they’ll take on leadership roles across the company’s AI and marketing technology teams.
With these deals, Canva is pushing beyond its reputation as a design tool and moving toward becoming a complete end-to-end work platform for teams. Canva says the additions strengthen key areas like agentic AI, data infrastructure, marketing automation, and customer engagement. In other words, it’s building a system where a team can go from early brainstorming to campaign execution, scaling, and performance measurement—all without jumping between disconnected tools.
Simtheory focuses on what’s quickly becoming one of the biggest trends in business software: AI agents that can do real work. Its platform helps organizations build AI assistants that understand how their business operates, work across multiple tools, and take on practical tasks rather than just generating ideas. Simtheory is designed to support the latest AI models across a range of use cases, while letting teams create agentic workflows tailored to specific needs—an approach that can make AI far more useful in day-to-day operations.
Ortto brings another missing piece for many marketing teams: a unified environment for customer data and marketing automation. The platform combines a customer data system with tools to build and run marketing journeys across channels like email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms, and surveys. Canva highlights Ortto’s event-driven architecture and no-code integrations, which make it easier to connect systems and activate customer data in real time. Ortto is already used by more than 11,000 customers across 190 countries, giving Canva an established foundation in customer engagement and lifecycle marketing.
Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht said Simtheory helps speed up Canva’s shift from being a design platform that includes AI tools into an AI-first platform where design and productivity tools are central. He also noted that Ortto strengthens Canva’s ability to support the entire marketing and content lifecycle through Canva Grow—from planning and creating to publishing and optimizing across channels.
Canva Grow is Canva’s tool focused on creating assets and measuring performance, and these acquisitions appear designed to deepen what Grow can do for modern marketing teams. By pairing creative production with AI agents, customer data, and marketing automation, Canva is positioning itself to compete more directly in the broader marketing technology and productivity space.
These aren’t isolated moves, either. Canva has been actively acquiring companies to expand its capabilities. In the past few months, it picked up digital outdoor advertising startup Doohly, and earlier announced a dual acquisition of Cavalry (animation) and MangoAI (ad performance improvements). Before those, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup MagicBrief in January 2025.
The momentum matches Canva’s scale. The company closed 2025 with $4 billion in annualized revenue, more than 265 million users, and 31 million paid users. It also reported a 20% increase in monthly active users—strong growth that helps explain why Canva is investing aggressively in AI features, marketing automation, and tools that keep teams working inside its ecosystem from start to finish.
