Beyond Design: Canva’s Multi-Million Dollar Bet on AI Agents and Marketing Automation

Canva is no longer just a tool for making quick Instagram posts or birthday cards. The design giant just announced a massive move to own the entire marketing process by acquiring two major players: Simtheory and Ortto. This double acquisition shows that Canva wants to move beyond simple graphics and become a platform where businesses run their whole operation. They aren’t just giving you a canvas; they are giving you a brain to help you manage your data and automate your tasks.

Both Simtheory and Ortto were started by Chris and Mike Sharkey. These brothers have a long history of building successful tech companies, including the vacation rental service Stayz. Now, they are joining Canva to lead the charge in AI and marketing infrastructure. While the price of the deal hasn’t been made public, the impact is already clear. Canva is building a system where teams can work from the first spark of an idea all the way to scaling a global campaign and measuring the results.

Simtheory is the part of this deal that focuses on “agentic AI.” This is a fancy way of saying they build AI assistants that actually understand how a business works. These aren’t just chatbots that answer questions. They can handle real tasks and set up complex workflows that run on their own. This helps teams move faster because the AI takes over the boring, repetitive parts of the job. It lets human creators focus on the actual design and strategy while the software handles the heavy lifting in the background.

Ortto brings a different kind of power to the table. It is a platform that combines a customer data store with powerful marketing automation. It lets businesses run journeys across email, SMS, and in-app messages all from one place. Ortto already serves over 11,000 customers in 190 countries, and its ability to connect different apps without needing to write code is a huge win for Canva. Cliff Obrecht, the co-founder of Canva, says that Ortto strengthens their ability to power the entire content lifecycle. From planning and creating to publishing and optimizing, Canva now has a tool for every step.

This isn’t the first time Canva has gone shopping lately. The company is on a serious acquisition spree. Just two weeks ago, they bought an outdoor advertising startup called Dashly. Before that, they picked up companies that specialize in animation, ad performance, and marketing intelligence. It is a clear plan to build a “one-stop shop” for any business that needs to market itself. Canva ended last year with a staggering $4 billion in annual revenue and over 185 million monthly users. By adding these new tools, they are ensuring that their 31 million paid users have every reason to keep their subscription active.

Canva is evolving from a design tool with some AI features into a full-scale AI platform with design tools at its core. This shift is vital as they compete with other tech giants who are also racing to own the AI workspace. By bringing the Sharkey brothers and their tech on board, Canva is betting that automation is the key to the next decade of growth. They want to make marketing so easy that you don’t even have to think about the technical details. You just bring the vision, and Canva handles the execution.