Canva has acquired two companies in a single move: Simtheory, an AI agent builder, and Ortto, a marketing automation platform. The double deal signals where the Australian design platform wants to compete next — agentic AI workflows and customer data-driven marketing, not just templates and drag-and-drop design.

The company confirmed the acquisitions in an announcement picked up by CMSWire. Financial terms were not disclosed in the initial coverage, so the deal values remain unknown.

What does Simtheory bring to Canva?

Simtheory builds tools for creating AI agents. Buying it gives Canva a direct entry into the agentic AI segment, where software performs multi-step tasks on a user's behalf rather than responding to one prompt at a time.

For Canva's user base — the marketers, small businesses and solo designers who already build visual content in the platform — the appeal is automation. Instead of manually assembling a campaign, users could delegate parts of the workflow to agents that Canva hosts itself, rather than depending on third-party model providers.

Why buy a marketing automation platform?

Ortto operates in customer data and marketing automation: email journeys, audience segmentation and behavior tracking. That is adjacent territory for Canva, which already sits at the start of many marketing workflows when teams create visuals.

Owning the automation layer means Canva can follow a campaign from design through delivery and measurement. It also puts the platform in more direct competition with established marketing automation vendors that currently serve Canva's core customers.

Who does this affect?

The deals matter most to two groups:

• Canva's business customers, who get a broader workflow in one subscription instead of stitching together design, AI and email tools from separate vendors.
• Competitors, who now face a platform combining visual creation, AI agents and marketing automation in a single product.

Canva has pushed deeper into workplace software over the past several years, expanding from its design-tool origins into documents, whiteboards and enterprise offerings. These two purchases extend that trajectory into AI execution and marketing operations.

What is still unknown?

Deal terms are not public. CMSWire's report does not state purchase prices, expected closing conditions or whether both teams will be fully integrated into Canva.

Also unclear: how quickly Canva will fold Simtheory's agent tooling and Ortto's automation stack into its main product, and whether existing Ortto customers will see pricing or feature changes.

What is clear is the direction. Canva is betting that the next phase of its business runs on AI agents doing the work and automation pipelines carrying it to customers — with design as the entry point.