Canva buys Simtheory and Ortto

Canva spent years making the ad, the slide deck, and the social post. On April 8, it bought two companies that help send the campaign, watch what customers do, and trigger the next message automatically. (canva.com) The two companies are Ortto and Simtheory. Canva said the deals add “complete marketing automation” and “agentic artificial intelligence,” which is software that can take actions across tools instead of just generating text or images. (canva.com) Ortto is the more concrete piece of the puzzle. Its product combines customer data, analytics, and automated messaging so a marketer can send email, text messages, and in-app prompts from one system. (ortto.com, ortto.com, ortto.com) That kind of software works like a flowchart with timers and tripwires. If a shopper visits a pricing page, ignores a cart, or opens an email, the system can wait a set number of hours and send the next message without a person pressing send. (ortto.com, ortto.com) Simtheory is aimed at a different job. It sells a team workspace where companies can build artificial intelligence assistants, connect them to internal systems, and let them handle tasks using more than 120 integrations and dozens of language models. (simtheory.ai, simtheory.ai, simtheory.ai) Put those together and Canva is no longer just the place where a marketer makes the email header. It is trying to become the place where a team designs the campaign, connects customer data, launches the journey, and lets software agents do parts of the follow-up work. (canva.com, martech.org) Canva has been moving in this direction for more than a year. It bought Leonardo.AI in July 2024 for generative image tools, then bought MangoAI and Cavalry in February 2026 to add more artificial intelligence and motion design features. (canva.com, canva.com, canva.com) The pattern is that Canva keeps adding pieces around the canvas itself. Affinity brought pro design tools, Leonardo brought image generation, Cavalry brought motion graphics, and now Ortto and Simtheory push Canva into the software that sits after the creative is finished. (canva.com, canva.com, canva.com, martech.org) MarTech described the shift plainly: Canva is moving beyond design into workflow, campaign execution, and customer data. That puts it closer to software categories usually occupied by marketing suites rather than template libraries. (martech.org) If Canva can stitch these products together cleanly, a small team could go from “make the launch assets” to “run the launch system” without leaving the same platform family. That is a much bigger business than selling templates, and it is why two small acquisitions can change what Canva actually is. (canva.com, martech.org)