Canva doubles down on artificial intelligence and marketing automation with Simtheory and Ortto acquisitions
Canva just made another bold move toward the future of creative technology. The company announced on Wednesday the simultaneous acquisition of two startups: Simtheory, a collaboration platform with artificial intelligence and agent management, and Ortto, which specializes in customer data and marketing automation. The deal amounts were not disclosed, but the message could not be any clearer.
According to Canva itself, these acquisitions are part of an ongoing investment in AI and marketing infrastructure. The strategy is to transform the platform into a complete work environment where teams can go from ideation all the way to campaign scaling and measurement, all within the same ecosystem. 🚀
One interesting detail is that both companies were founded by Chris and Mike Sharkey, who already had a solid track record in the tech world. The brothers are former founders of the vacation rental service Stayz, which was acquired by Fairfax Media. Now, the duo will join Canva in leadership roles within the company’s AI technology and marketing teams.
What is Simtheory and why it matters so much
Simtheory is not just any startup. It was built to solve a problem that many creative and business teams face today: how to coordinate artificial intelligence agents in collaborative workflows without losing control of the process.
In practical terms, Simtheory’s platform helps teams build AI assistants that truly understand the business context, work seamlessly with other tools, and execute real tasks. We are not talking about generic chatbots here. The goal is to let teams apply the most advanced language models across different use cases and configure custom agentic workflows tailored to their specific needs.
With Simtheory being folded into the Canva ecosystem, the expectation is that users will gain access to more sophisticated AI orchestration features directly within the platform. Imagine being able to delegate creative tasks to intelligent agents, track progress in real time, and still collaborate with your team in the same environment without having to jump between dozens of tools. That is exactly the kind of experience Canva is trying to build, and Simtheory is a key piece of that puzzle.
On top of that, agent management is one of the hottest topics in tech right now. With major companies betting heavily on automated workflows and generative AI, whoever can offer an accessible and efficient interface for that management will have a serious edge. Canva seems to have understood this very well, and the Simtheory acquisition is concrete evidence of that vision. 👀
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Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht summed up the expected impact nicely when he said that Simtheory accelerates Canva’s evolution from a design platform with AI tools into an AI platform with design and productivity at its core. It is a subtle reordering of words, but it carries an enormous meaning about the company’s strategic direction.
Marketing automation and customer data enter the picture with Ortto
On the other side of the equation is Ortto, an Australian platform focused on customer data and marketing automation. For those unfamiliar, Ortto combines a CDP (Customer Data Platform) with customer journey automation tools, allowing companies to create personalized experiences at scale.
That means advanced segmentation, automated communication flows, and user behavior analysis, all in one place. The platform lets teams design and execute customer journeys through email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messages, forms, and surveys, all within a single integrated system.
One standout feature is Ortto’s event-driven architecture, combined with no-code integrations that make it easy to connect and activate data in real time. This kind of infrastructure is what allows campaigns to react to user behavior dynamically without the need for constant manual intervention. The platform is already used by more than 11,000 customers across 190 countries, which shows we are not talking about a small or niche solution.
The logic behind the acquisition makes a lot of sense when you look at what Canva wants to become. Today, the platform is already used by marketing teams around the world to create visual assets. With Ortto in the mix, those same teams will be able to not only create the content but also distribute it intelligently, based on real customer behavior data. Marketing automation stops being a separate step and becomes part of the same creative flow, connected to the assets produced right inside Canva.
Cliff Obrecht also highlighted that Ortto strengthens Canva’s ability to power the entire marketing and content lifecycle through Canva Grow, the company’s tool for asset creation and performance measurement. With Ortto integrated, Canva Grow gains capabilities that span from planning and creation to publishing and optimization across all channels. 🎯
The potential of integrating Simtheory and Ortto within Canva
When you put both acquisitions side by side, the picture that emerges is pretty exciting. Think of a campaign that starts as a visual idea inside Canva, goes through a creation process assisted by artificial intelligence agents from Simtheory, and is then distributed in an automated and personalized way using Ortto’s capabilities. All of that without leaving the ecosystem.
This is the kind of promise that could change the way marketing and design teams work together, eliminating friction and accelerating results in a way that simply does not exist on any single platform today. The ability to go from initial ideas to campaign scaling and measurement within a single environment is what separates a design tool from a true creative operating system.
Simtheory’s agentic workflows, for instance, can be used to automate the generation of creative asset variations, while Ortto handles testing and distributing those variations to the right audience segments. It is a combination that has the potential to drastically reduce the time between conceiving a campaign and actually launching it in the market.
An acquisition spree that reveals a bigger strategy
Canva’s move did not come out of nowhere. These two latest acquisitions are part of a full-on buying spree the company has been running. Just two weeks before this announcement, Canva had acquired Doohly, a digital out-of-home advertising startup. Six weeks before that, the company announced the dual acquisition of Cavalry, which specializes in animation, and MangoAI, focused on improving ad performance. And before all of that, in January 2025, came the purchase of MagicBrief, a marketing intelligence startup.
This fast-paced acquisition rhythm shows that Canva is executing a well-defined strategy to expand its capabilities. Each acquired company adds a new layer to the ecosystem, whether in visual creation, animation, ad performance, outdoor advertising, customer data, or AI agent orchestration.
And the numbers back up the ambition. Canva closed 2025 with an annualized revenue of 4 billion dollars, with more than 265 million users and 31 million paying subscribers. The company also reported a 20% growth in monthly active users, showing that its user base is not just large but also increasingly engaged.
From design tool to AI platform with design at its core
Over the past few years, the company had already been making a series of strategic bets to go beyond visual creation. Acquiring tools like Flourish for data visualization and Affinity for professional editing already signaled that the plan was to build something bigger. The acquisitions of Simtheory and Ortto reinforce that direction even further, showing that Canva wants to be the creative operating system for businesses, not just another design tool in a team’s toolkit.
This integrated platform approach is increasingly common among major tech companies, but Canva’s edge lies in how it democratized access to professional design. By bringing artificial intelligence, marketing automation, and agent management into an interface that anyone can use, the company is betting that the next step in that democratization is intelligent automation itself.
The creative tools market is going through an unprecedented transformation. With generative artificial intelligence changing what is possible in a matter of minutes, platforms that can combine creation, collaboration, and distribution in one place will have a massive competitive advantage. Canva is positioning each of these acquisitions as a building block in that construction, and Simtheory is perhaps the most strategic one of all, because it is what will allow AI agents to operate within the ecosystem in a coordinated and genuinely useful way for end users. 💡
What to expect going forward
At the end of the day, what these moves show is that Canva is playing a much longer game than it might seem at first glance. This is not just about adding artificial intelligence features or buying up cool technology. It is about completely redesigning what a creative work platform means in a world where AI is not an add-on but the center of the process.
With Chris and Mike Sharkey coming on board in leadership positions, Canva also gains proven entrepreneurial experience. The brothers have already been through the full cycle of building and selling a tech company with Stayz, and they now bring that expertise to help lead the AI and marketing fronts within Canva.
The acquisitions of Simtheory and Ortto are, together, a pretty clear signal of where Canva wants to be in the coming years. The company is positioning itself not just as a leader in accessible design but as a complete platform that covers the entire creative and marketing cycle, from the first rough draft to results analysis. And if the execution matches the ambition, it is going to be really interesting to watch this play out. 🚀
