Both companies were built by brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey, who previously co-founded Australian holiday rental site Stayz. Financial terms were not disclosed. Canva will preview what it calls the biggest transformation in its history at Canva Create on 16 April.
Canva has acquired two companies simultaneously: Simtheory, an agentic AI collaboration platform, and Ortto, a customer data platform and marketing automation company.
Both were built by Australian brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey, who will join Canva in leadership roles across its AI and marketing technology teams. Financial terms were not disclosed for either deal.
The Sharkeys are serial founders. Before Ortto and Simtheory they co-founded Stayz, then Australia’s largest holiday accommodation booking site, which was sold to Fairfax Digital in 2006 and subsequently to HomeAway for $225 million in 2013.
Ortto itself has an older lineage: it began as Autopilot, a marketing automation company the brothers founded in 2015, rebuilt from the ground up after 2018, and rebranded as Ortto in March 2022.
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Simtheory grew out of an AI podcast the Sharkeys launched in 2023 to explore new models and AI capabilities; the tooling they built to produce the show evolved into a multi-model AI workspace for teams.
The two acquisitions serve distinct parts of Canva’s platform ambitions. Simtheory brings agentic AI infrastructure: its platform allows teams to build AI assistants that understand their business context, co-ordinate across tasks and applications, and complete work with the reliability and auditability enterprises require.
Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and COO said exclusive for TNW that “In a world where generating ideas is easier than ever, the challenge has shifted to turning those ideas into real, usable work.
We’re excited to welcome Simtheory to Canva as we evolve from a design platform with AI tools, to an AI platform with design and productivity tools. They’ve built great agentic technology which we’re looking forward to bringing to the quarter of a billion people using Canva every month.”
Ortto addresses the marketing lifecycle end of Canva’s ambitions. The platform combines a customer data platform with multi-channel marketing automation, enabling teams to build and run journeys across email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms, and surveys from a single system.
It uses an event-driven architecture and no-code integrations to connect and activate customer data in real time.
The company counts more than 11,000 customers across 190 countries. The acquisition feeds into Canva Grow, Canva’s marketing product, and follows three earlier additions in the same direction: MagicBrief, acquired in January 2025; MangoAI, acquired in February 2026 for AI-driven video ad optimisation; and Doohly, acquired in March 2026 for digital out-of-home advertising.
Canva, launched in 2013 and headquartered in Sydney, is used by more than 265 million people each month and closed 2025 with more than $4 billion in annualised revenue.
Mike Sharkey, CEO of both Ortto and Simtheory, said the scale of Canva’s user base was the central draw: “The opportunity to bring our technology to the quarter of a billion people using Canva every month and to help more people make the most of AI in their everyday work is incredibly exciting to us.”
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