Canva Acquires SimTheory and Ortto for AI Marketing Tools

Canva, the Sydney-based design software company valued at more than $60 billion, has acquired two Australian technology firms, SimTheory and Ortto, in a move to expand its platform into AI-driven marketing automation and customer data management. The deals, announced this week, mark Canva's latest effort to evolve from a graphic design tool into a comprehensive system for end-to-end workflows, with financial terms undisclosed.

SimTheory, an AI collaboration platform founded recently in Sydney, enables teams to build autonomous AI agents that understand business contexts, execute multistep tasks, and integrate with various software tools. These agentic systems can handle complex operations like campaign orchestration, audience segmentation, and performance optimization without constant human input. Ortto, also Sydney-based and operational since 2015, provides marketing automation capabilities, including a customer data platform that unifies information from multiple sources for real-time activation. It supports multichannel campaigns via email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms, and surveys, serving more than 11,000 customers across 190 countries.