Canva has acquired two startups, Simtheory and Ortto, on undisclosed terms. The deals, announced on 9 April 2026, extend the design platform deeper into AI tooling and marketing automation.

The two companies do different jobs. Simtheory is an AI collaboration and agent management platform. Ortto sells customer data platform (CDP) software paired with marketing automation tools.

Both startups share the same founders. Chris and Mike Sharkey built them after founding Stayz, the Australian vacation rental business. The brothers will join Canva in leadership roles spanning its AI and marketing technology teams.

What the acquired products actually do

Simtheory gives teams a secure workspace for running multiple AI models from providers including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic without locking into a single vendor. The product centers on AI agents that can plan, reason, and complete multi-step work such as research and analysis. Those agents connect to company tools and data, including internal systems and SaaS platforms.

Ortto operates on the marketing side. Its CDP unifies customer information, and its automation software runs campaigns across email, SMS, and in-app messaging. The company pitches revenue growth through personalized messages triggered by real-time customer actions, citing one example of a 20% increase in subscriptions via automated customer journeys.

A buying streak, not a one-off

The Simtheory and Ortto deals follow a run of recent Canva acquisitions: Doohly, MagicBrief, Cavalry, and MangoAI. That pattern points to a deliberate build-out rather than opportunistic purchases.

The strategic direction is clear. Canva started in content creation — design templates, presentations, visual assets. With Ortto it gains customer journey management. With Simtheory it gains agentic AI capable of handling multi-step work like research, drafting, and analysis. Combined, the tools could turn Canva into a broader business software platform where users build campaigns and AI agents handle supporting tasks.

One caveat worth noting: the source materials do not claim these systems autonomously execute and optimize Ortto campaigns. The agents assist with tasks; the marketing automation runs the journeys. Whether Canva fuses the two into a single autonomous pipeline remains to be seen.

Competitive pressure spreads downstream

The acquisitions put Canva into more direct competition with marketing platforms such as HubSpot, moving it past design tools and into customer engagement software. That shift pressures two categories at once: creative software vendors and marketing software vendors.

For Canva's core small-business customer base, integration could bring AI agents and marketing automation — capabilities that historically required separate enterprise contracts — into a single subscription product. No pricing, availability dates, or integration timelines for the combined offering have been disclosed.

The financial terms of both deals remain private. Canva has not said how the Simtheory and Ortto products will be packaged for existing subscribers.