Canva announced on April 9, 2026 the dual acquisition of Simtheory, an AI collaboration and agent management platform, and Ortto, a customer data and marketing automation company. For email marketers, growth teams, and business owners who have long wished their design tool could talk to their campaign data, this deal changes the calculus in a meaningful way.
According to TechCrunch, the financial terms of both deals were not disclosed. What is clear, however, is the direction Canva is moving: away from pure design and toward a platform that owns the entire marketing lifecycle.
What Canva Is Actually Buying
The two acquisitions serve distinct but complementary purposes. Simtheory allows teams to apply the latest AI models across a wide range of use cases and easily set up agentic systems that meet their needs. Think less "AI that generates copy" and more "AI that executes tasks across your workflow without hand-holding."
Ortto is the piece that matters most to marketers focused on email, segmentation, and campaign ROI. Ortto combines a customer data platform with marketing automation, enabling teams to design and orchestrate journeys across email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms, and surveys, all within a single system. With an event-driven architecture and no-code integrations, it makes it easy to connect and activate customer data in real time.
Ortto is unique because it brings marketing automation together with a customer data platform and analytics in a single tool, allowing teams to create highly personalized journeys and report on user behavior, attribution, and key metrics. That combination, unified data plus multi-channel automation plus analytics, is exactly what fragmented martech stacks have historically failed to deliver under one roof.
Ortto currently serves more than 11,000 customers across 190 countries, and its 40-member team will continue to build its standalone product while contributing to Canva's expanding marketing suite.
Canva announced on April 9, 2026 the dual acquisition of Simtheory, an AI collaboration and agent management platform, and Ortto, a customer data and marketing automation company. For email marketers, growth teams, and business owners who have long wished their design tool could talk to their campaign data, this deal changes the calculus in a meaningful way.
According to TechCrunch, the financial terms of both deals were not disclosed. What is clear, however, is the direction Canva is moving: away from pure design and toward a platform that owns the entire marketing lifecycle.
What Canva Is Actually Buying
The two acquisitions serve distinct but complementary purposes. Simtheory allows teams to apply the latest AI models across a wide range of use cases and easily set up agentic systems that meet their needs. Think less "AI that generates copy" and more "AI that executes tasks across your workflow without hand-holding."
Ortto is the piece that matters most to marketers focused on email, segmentation, and campaign ROI. Ortto combines a customer data platform with marketing automation, enabling teams to design and orchestrate journeys across email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms, and surveys, all within a single system. With an event-driven architecture and no-code integrations, it makes it easy to connect and activate customer data in real time.
Ortto is unique because it brings marketing automation together with a customer data platform and analytics in a single tool, allowing teams to create highly personalized journeys and report on user behavior, attribution, and key metrics. That combination, unified data plus multi-channel automation plus analytics, is exactly what fragmented martech stacks have historically failed to deliver under one roof.
Ortto currently serves more than 11,000 customers across 190 countries, and its 40-member team will continue to build its standalone product while contributing to Canva's expanding marketing suite.
The Founders Behind Both Companies
Both companies were founded by brothers Chris Sharkey and Mike Sharkey, who will now join Canva in leadership roles across its AI and marketing technology teams. The Sharkeys previously co-founded Stayz, which was acquired by Fairfax Media. The fact that a single founding team built both Simtheory and Ortto suggests the two products were always designed with compatible architecture in mind, which should reduce the integration risk that often plagues acquisitions of this kind.
Ortto's founders told existing customers on the company blog that day-to-day operations will not change, writing that "nothing changes about how Ortto works today," with the same account structure, pricing, workflows, and support team remaining in place.
Where This Fits in Canva's Broader Strategy
This is not a one-off deal. These latest acquisitions come as Canva has been on an acquisition run. Two weeks ago, the company acquired digital outdoor advertising startup Doohly. Six weeks ago, Canva announced the dual acquisition of Cavalry, which works on animation, and MangoAI, which works on improving ad performance. Before that, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup MagicBrief in January 2025.
In October 2025, Canva unveiled its Creative Operating System, its largest product evolution to date, introducing upgraded video tools, a marketing engine called Canva Grow, and a new Canva Business tier. Ortto's capabilities feed directly into Canva Grow. As Canva COO and co-founder Cliff Obrecht stated in the official announcement, Ortto strengthens Canva's ability to "power the entire marketing and content lifecycle through Canva Grow, from planning and creating to publishing and optimising across every channel."
The Simtheory acquisition lays the groundwork for Canva's evolution into the system where humans and AI collaborate to go from idea to finished product, which the company plans to unveil at Canva Create on April 16. Canva is hosting Canva Create Los Angeles 2026 on April 16 at Hollywood Park.
What This Means for Email Marketers
For marketers managing email campaigns today, the practical upside of Ortto joining Canva is the potential to close the gap between content creation and campaign execution inside one platform. For today's marketing teams, launching a campaign means juggling data, content, channels, and performance across disconnected tools, and too often that means spending more time coordinating than creating.
Ortto's visual journey builder simplifies creating automated workflows with a drag-and-drop interface, removing the need for coding while supporting complex, multichannel campaigns. Advanced segmentation tools group audiences by diverse criteria such as purchase history and engagement, and dynamic segments adjust automatically as customer data evolves, keeping campaigns relevant and responsive.
The Founders Behind Both Companies
Both companies were founded by brothers Chris Sharkey and Mike Sharkey, who will now join Canva in leadership roles across its AI and marketing technology teams. The Sharkeys previously co-founded Stayz, which was acquired by Fairfax Media. The fact that a single founding team built both Simtheory and Ortto suggests the two products were always designed with compatible architecture in mind, which should reduce the integration risk that often plagues acquisitions of this kind.
Ortto's founders told existing customers on the company blog that day-to-day operations will not change, writing that "nothing changes about how Ortto works today," with the same account structure, pricing, workflows, and support team remaining in place.
Where This Fits in Canva's Broader Strategy
This is not a one-off deal. These latest acquisitions come as Canva has been on an acquisition run. Two weeks ago, the company acquired digital outdoor advertising startup Doohly. Six weeks ago, Canva announced the dual acquisition of Cavalry, which works on animation, and MangoAI, which works on improving ad performance. Before that, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup MagicBrief in January 2025.
In October 2025, Canva unveiled its Creative Operating System, its largest product evolution to date, introducing upgraded video tools, a marketing engine called Canva Grow, and a new Canva Business tier. Ortto's capabilities feed directly into Canva Grow. As Canva COO and co-founder Cliff Obrecht stated in the official announcement, Ortto strengthens Canva's ability to "power the entire marketing and content lifecycle through Canva Grow, from planning and creating to publishing and optimising across every channel."
The Simtheory acquisition lays the groundwork for Canva's evolution into the system where humans and AI collaborate to go from idea to finished product, which the company plans to unveil at Canva Create on April 16. Canva is hosting Canva Create Los Angeles 2026 on April 16 at Hollywood Park.
What This Means for Email Marketers
For marketers managing email campaigns today, the practical upside of Ortto joining Canva is the potential to close the gap between content creation and campaign execution inside one platform. For today's marketing teams, launching a campaign means juggling data, content, channels, and performance across disconnected tools, and too often that means spending more time coordinating than creating.
Ortto's visual journey builder simplifies creating automated workflows with a drag-and-drop interface, removing the need for coding while supporting complex, multichannel campaigns. Advanced segmentation tools group audiences by diverse criteria such as purchase history and engagement, and dynamic segments adjust automatically as customer data evolves, keeping campaigns relevant and responsive.
The Ortto CDP allows teams to connect a wide range of tools through integrations, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify, and Google Ads. For a growth team currently stitching together five separate tools to run a single nurture sequence, that kind of native data connectivity directly affects deliverability, personalization quality, and ultimately revenue attribution.
The acquisitions signal Canva's intent to compete in the crowded marketing automation, customer data platform, and agentic AI market, and integrating these capabilities into a coherent platform experience will be key as Canva looks to leverage its 265 million monthly users to scale the acquired technologies. Whether Canva can deliver on that integration promise, without adding the complexity it is ostensibly trying to remove, will be the real test.
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The Ortto CDP allows teams to connect a wide range of tools through integrations, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify, and Google Ads. For a growth team currently stitching together five separate tools to run a single nurture sequence, that kind of native data connectivity directly affects deliverability, personalization quality, and ultimately revenue attribution.
The acquisitions signal Canva's intent to compete in the crowded marketing automation, customer data platform, and agentic AI market, and integrating these capabilities into a coherent platform experience will be key as Canva looks to leverage its 265 million monthly users to scale the acquired technologies. Whether Canva can deliver on that integration promise, without adding the complexity it is ostensibly trying to remove, will be the real test.
