Canva Acquires New Tools to Boost AI, Marketing, and Customer Engagement

Canva announced the simultaneous acquisition of two companies on Wednesday: Simtheory, an AI collaboration and agent management platform, and Ortto, a customer data and marketing automation company. Financial terms for both deals were not disclosed.

The purchases share more than a closing date. Both Simtheory and Ortto were founded by brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey, who previously built and sold the Australian vacation rental service Stayz to Fairfax Media. The pair will join Canva in leadership roles spanning the company's AI and marketing technology teams.

Simtheory's platform lets teams build AI assistants that can understand a specific business context, work across existing tools, and execute real tasks. The product allows organizations to configure agentic workflows tailored to their operations and apply the latest AI models across a range of use cases. Ortto, originally launched in 2015 as Autopilot and rebranded in March 2022, is a Sydney-headquartered platform that helps marketers capture leads, build customer journeys, and automate omnichannel campaigns. Its clients have included Atlassian, Patreon, and Greenpeace.

Together, Canva said the acquisitions strengthen its capabilities in agentic AI, data infrastructure, marketing automation, and customer engagement. The company framed the deals as part of its broader effort to evolve from a design tool into an end-to-end work platform, extending the product experience from early creative ideation all the way through campaign scaling and performance measurement.

The moves continue an aggressive acquisition streak for the Australian design company, which recorded $4 billion in annualized revenue in 2025 and counted more than 265 million users, including 31 million paying customers. Canva was valued at $65 billion following a secondary share sale in mid-2025 and has signaled a potential U.S. public listing later in 2026.

The Sharkey brothers' dual involvement in both acquired companies gives Canva a rare continuity of leadership across a stack it is now positioning as central to how enterprise marketing teams will operate. Whether Simtheory's agentic infrastructure and Ortto's customer data capabilities can be stitched together into a cohesive platform will be the real test of the deal's strategic logic.