Both companies were founded by brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey, who previously founded Australian vacation rental site Stayz. Financial terms were not disclosed. Canva will look at what it calls the biggest transformation in its history at Canva Create on April 16.
Canva bought two companies at the same time: Symtheoryagent AI collaboration platform and Orthoa customer data platform and marketing automation company.
Both were built by Australian brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey, who will take on leadership roles in Canva’s AI and marketing technology teams. Financial terms of both deals were not disclosed.
Sharkeys are serial builders. Before Ortto and Simtheory, they founded Stayz, then Australia’s largest holiday booking site, which was sold to Fairfax Digital in 2006 and then to HomeAway in 2013 for $225 million.
Ortto itself has an older pedigree: it started as Autopilot, a marketing automation company founded by the brothers in 2015, rebuilt from the ground up in 2018, and rebranded as Ortto in March 2022.
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Simtheory grew out of Sharkeys AI podcast launched in 2023 to explore new models and possibilities of artificial intelligence; The tools they built to produce the show became a multi-model AI workspace for the teams.
The two acquisitions serve different parts of Canva’s platform ambitions. Simtheory brings an agent AI infrastructure: its platform enables teams to build AI assistants that understand their work context, coordinate across tasks and applications, and get work done with the reliability and auditability that businesses demand.
Cliff Obrecht, Co-Founder and COO of Canva told TNW exclusively 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 transform from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design and productivity tools. They’ve built great agent technology that we look forward to bringing to the quarter of a billion people who use Canva every month.”
Ortto is touching the end of the marketing lifecycle of Canva’s ambitions. The platform combines a customer data platform with omnichannel marketing automation, enabling teams to build and manage email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms and survey journeys 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 has more than 11,000 customers in 190 countries. The acquisition joins Canva Grow, Canva’s marketing product, and follows three previous additions in the same vein: MagicBriefPurchased in January 2025; MangoAI was acquired in February 2026 for AI-based video ad optimization; and Doohly was acquired for digital out-of-home advertising in March 2026.
Launched in 2013 and headquartered in Sydney, Canva is used by more than 265 million people every month and closed 2025 with more than $4 billion in annual revenue.
Both Ortto and Simtheory CEO Mike Sharkey said the scale of Canva’s user base was a central draw: “The opportunity to bring our technology to the quarter of a billion people who use Canva every month and help even more people make the most of AI in their everyday work is incredibly exciting for us.”
