Canva, the world’s leading visual communication platform, announced the acquisitions of Simtheory, an AI collaboration and agent management platform, and Ortto, a customer data and marketing automation company, as part of its continued investment in artificial intelligence and marketing infrastructure.

Together, the acquisitions bring complementary strengths across agentic AI, data infrastructure, marketing automation, and customer engagement, accelerating Canva’s ambition to move beyond a design tool and become the system where teams do all of their work from start to finish. These additions will expand how Canva powers the full workflow from early ideas through to campaign scaling and measurement.


Both companies were founded by Chris and Mike Sharkey, previously founders of Stayz, which was acquired by Fairfax Media. They will join Canva in leadership roles across the company’s AI and marketing technology teams.

We’re excited to welcome Simtheory and Ortto to Canva. They’ve built exceptional teams and technology, and this acquisition marks an important step toward evolving Canva from a design tool into the system where work happens end-to-end, whether it’s a quick idea or a full campaign,” said Cliff Obrecht, Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer at Canva.

“Simtheory accelerates our evolution from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design and productivity tools at its core. We’re excited to share some of our early work at Canva Create on April 16, where we’ll unveil the biggest transformation in Canva’s history, reimagining the process of creation, just as we did a decade ago. At the same time, Ortto strengthens our ability to power the entire marketing and content lifecycle through Canva Grow, from planning and creating to publishing and optimising across every channel. This builds on our recent acquisitions of MagicBrief, MangoAI and Doohly, and we’ve only scratched the surface of the opportunity here,” he added.