Canva boosts its AI presence with the acquisition of a Sydney start-up

The latest local acquisition by design-at-scale unicorn Canva aims to beef up its products for the lucrative enterprise market.

Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht with MagicBrief founder and CEO George Howes.

Australian tech unicorn Canva will acquire marketing and advertising design and analytics start-up MagicBrief to boost its expansion in the enterprise sector and further entice cashed-up corporate subscribers to its design platform.

MagicBrief, based in Sydney and founded by former Eucalyptus executive George Howes and Dan Nolan, combines design and analytics tools to help marketers build out advertising strategies, assess competition and share ideas and designs on an all-in-one platform.

The Canva acquisition comes at an undisclosed sum. MagicBrief completed a $2m funding round in 2023 without providing a valuation, counting Blackbird Ventures as a backer.

Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht said: “We’ve spent the last decade empowering millions of teams to create impactful and engaging visual content.

“Now, with MagicBrief joining Canva, we’re entering the next frontier by powering the entire content and marketing workflow, from ideation and creation to deployment, measurement, and now optimisation.

“In today’s visual economy, winning brands are those that know exactly what creative works, where it works, and why.

“By combining MagicBrief’s AI-powered insights with Canva’s Visual Suite, we’re giving every team the tools to not just create great content, but drive stronger results.”

Canva is continuing to build out its enterprise products following the launch of its spreadsheet app in April.

At the time, the $US32bn company said its expansion into selling its services to the biggest companies in the world had boosted annualised revenue from $2.5bn to more than $3bn.

The MagicBrief acquisition is not the first time Canva has taken over a fellow Blackbird portfolio company after acquiring another Sydney start-up, AI image generator Leonardo.AI, for an undisclosed sum last year.

Canva, which has more than 240 million monthly users, will incorporate MagicBrief’s products into its Visual Suite, allowing subscribers to analyse marketing trends and designs in real-time using artificial intelligence.

Canva said MagicBrief would continue as an independent operation in the near term.

Blackbird partner Nick Crocker said: “This acquisition reflects a deep understanding of the creative intelligence space by both companies.

“MagicBrief will be able to scale its product to Canva’s millions of users, and Canva strengthens its platform with more specialised tools that marketers and brands everywhere can benefit from.

“The tradition of more mature companies acquiring earlier-stage ones is well established in larger markets like Silicon Valley, but it’s exciting to see it happening more frequently here in Australia. We’re proud to have been major investors in both companies from the earliest days and excited to see what the future holds for them.”

MagicBrief counts pop star Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, Koala and Linktree among the growing list of brands it has worked with, and has analysed more than $6bn in ad spend, per a statement accompanying news of the acquisition.

MagicBrief’s staff, believed to be around 20 in number, will have stock options converted to Canva shares at a time when Canva is sizing up the market for a float on Wall Street.

US President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff wars prolonged the IPO drought. Big tech firms since the most recent US election have experienced major fluctuations in share price, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq index down 2 per cent in the past six months.

A secondary share sale in 2024 made some Canva staff millionaires, raising $3.6bn.

In 2024, Mr Obrecht told The Australian there was “no big rush” for Canva’s float.

Originally published as Canva boosts its AI presence with the acquisition of a Sydney start-up