Canva just made two acquisitions that have almost nothing to do with design. On April 8, the company announced it had acquired Simtheory, an AI collaboration and agent management platform, and Ortto, a customer data and marketing automation company. Neither deal was about adding pretty templates. Both were about becoming an AI-first business platform.

Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and COO, said it plainly: “Simtheory accelerates our evolution from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design and productivity tools at its core.”

That sentence deserves a second read. They are not adding AI tools to their design product. They are repositioning the design product as one component of an AI platform.

What Simtheory Actually Does

Simtheory is not a household name, but what it does matters. The platform lets teams build AI assistants that understand their business, work across existing tools, and handle real tasks with agentic workflows. Users can connect to leading models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, then give those agents practical integrations — creating documents, reading emails, updating CRM records — all without custom development work.

In other words, it is an AI agent management layer designed for teams who are not AI engineers. That is exactly the kind of capability Canva is betting will define the next generation of business software.

Both Simtheory and Ortto were founded by Chris and Mike Sharkey, who previously built Stayz, the Australian vacation rental platform acquired by Fairfax Media. The founders are joining Canva in leadership roles across AI and marketing technology.

What Ortto Brings

Ortto adds a different but complementary capability. It is a customer data platform combined with marketing automation — email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms, and surveys in a single system. More than 11,000 customers across 190 countries use it.

Together, the acquisitions give Canva the building blocks to manage the entire content and campaign lifecycle: generate creative with AI, deploy it through automated channels, measure results, and feed those results back into the next cycle. Canva has confirmed it will show early work combining all three products at Canva Create on April 16.

This Is Happening to Every Business Tool

The Canva acquisition is interesting on its own, but the more important signal is what it represents across the market.

Every major software platform used by businesses is currently racing to embed AI agents into its core product. Salesforce has agentic features across its suite. Atlassian rebuilt Rovo as a Confluence-native agent. Monday.com launched an AI agent marketplace. Microsoft has been restructuring Copilot as a control plane for agents across Office 365 tools.

Canva is used by over 200 million people and is one of the most widely adopted business tools on the planet. The fact that they are now defining themselves as an AI platform — not a design tool — is a marker that this transition has moved from enterprise-only experimentation to mainstream business software.

The days of AI being a bolt-on feature in your existing tools are ending. It is becoming the foundation.

What This Means for Business

There are two ways to interpret Canva’s move.

The first is optimistic: your existing tools are about to get dramatically more powerful. If you use Canva today, you will soon have access to AI agents that can manage workflows, automate campaigns, and handle tasks that currently require multiple team members. You do not need to build anything custom to access agentic AI.

The second is a practical challenge: as AI agents become embedded in every tool, the value of those tools will increasingly depend on how well your team can configure, direct, and manage them. A team with strong data and AI skills will extract far more value from an AI-native Canva than a team that treats it as a drag-and-drop tool.

This gap — between teams who can use AI agents well and teams who cannot — is where competitive advantage will be built or lost over the next few years. It is why data literacy and AI skills are no longer optional for any business that wants to grow.

The tools are evolving fast. The question is whether your team is evolving with them.

---

If you’re building with Claude or Codex right now, grab the free Working With Claude field guide. Thirty-two pages on the full ecosystem, Claude Code in depth, and how to roll agents out properly. Get the free guide.