Canva is buying two more startups, and both point in the same direction: the company wants to be more than a place where people make pretty slides. The latest acquisitions are Simtheory, an AI collaboration and agent management platform, and Ortto, a customer data and marketing automation company. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the message is loud enough: Canva is building the plumbing for teams that want to plan, create, automate, and measure campaigns without bouncing between half a dozen tools.
That push fits a broader pattern. Canva has been on an acquisition streak, picking up Doohly two weeks ago, then Cavalry and MangoAI six weeks ago, and marketing intelligence startup MagicBrief before that. The company is no longer shopping for novelty; it is stacking adjacent products that make Canva harder to swap out once a team is in deep.
What Simtheory adds to Canva
Simtheory is the more ambitious of the two deals. Canva says the platform helps teams build AI assistants that understand a business, work across tools, and handle real tasks. It also lets teams use current models across different use cases and create agentic workflows tailored to their needs. In plain English: this is Canva reaching for the unglamorous, valuable part of AI, where software does more than generate content and starts doing work.
There is also a leadership angle. Chris and Mike Sharkey, who founded both Simtheory and Ortto after previously founding vacation rental service Stayz, will join Canva in leadership roles across the company’s AI and marketing technology teams. That gives Canva not just product code, but operators who have already built and sold software in adjacent categories.
Ortto turns Canva Grow into a fuller stack
Ortto plugs a different gap. The company combines a customer data platform with marketing automation, so teams can build journeys across email, SMS, push, in-app messaging, forms, and surveys in one place. Canva says Ortto’s event-driven architecture and no-code integrations make it easier to connect and activate data in real time, and that the platform is used by more than 11,000 customers in 190 countries. That is the sort of installed base most software companies would happily inherit.
For Canva, the fit is obvious. Canva Grow is its tool for asset creation and performance measurement, so Ortto adds the missing middle: orchestration, segmentation, and customer messaging. Put together, the stack moves Canva closer to the workflow marketing teams actually live in, not just the part where they make the banner.
Canva’s AI marketing strategy goes beyond design
Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht framed the deals as a transition from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design and productivity tools at its core. That is a tidy line, but it also reveals the strategy: if Canva can own both creation and distribution, it gets much stickier than a standalone design app. Adobe has spent years trying to bundle creative and marketing software into a single ecosystem; Canva is now making its own version of that play, just with a friendlier interface and a lot less legacy baggage.
The timing is not subtle. Canva closed 2025 at $4 billion in annualized revenue, with more than 265 million users and 31 million paid users. It also reported a 20% increase in monthly active users. Those are the numbers of a company with room to expand, and the acquisitions suggest it wants growth from deeper workflows, not just more signups.
- Simtheory: AI collaboration and agent management
- Ortto: customer data and marketing automation
- Canva Grow: asset creation and performance measurement
- Ortto customer base: more than 11,000 customers in 190 countries
- Canva 2025 revenue: $4 billion in annualized revenue
The open question is how far Canva wants to go. A design tool can become a workflow platform, sure. But once it starts absorbing AI agents, customer data, and marketing automation, it is no longer competing only with design software. It is stepping into the territory of marketing suites, automation platforms, and the increasingly crowded business of being the system of record for creative work.