From left, Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief working officer, and George Howes, co-founder and CEO of MagicBrief, pose for a photograph on the Cannes Lions pageant in Cannes, France, in June 2025.
Canva
Canva has grown right into a $32 billion startup by its standard design instruments used for simply creating pictures, advertising and marketing materials and displays.
Now the corporate, with its twelfth acquisition, is shopping for its approach into the analytics market.
Canva mentioned on Tuesday that it is shopping for MagicBrief, whose expertise is used for analyzing advert efficiency, for an undisclosed sum. With MagicBrief, corporations can observe spending and engagement on their advertisements and see what’s working effectively for opponents.
Round 240 million folks use Canva’s merchandise, which compete with choices from Adobe’s Inventive Cloud. The corporate has been deepening its capabilities in synthetic intelligence, incorporating it into picture enhancing, coding and by incorporating chatbots.
“We really feel like, particularly with AI, we are able to actually democratize advertising and marketing and permit entrepreneurs to do much more with much less,” Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and chief working officer, mentioned in an interview.
Canva, which ranked fifth on CNBC’s recognition Disruptor 50 record, has raised over $560 million, and was valued most just lately at $32 billion, although that is a step down from its peak of $40 billion in 2021, when non-public markets had been at their frothiest. Obrecht mentioned the corporate has $1 billion within the financial institution.
Canva plans to include MagicBrief right into a broader product that it’ll announce later this yr, Obrecht mentioned. In October, Adobe announced the availability of a instrument for creating advertisements with AI after which monitoring efficiency.
In the meantime, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Reddit are all pushing generative AI techniques to spice up the attain of on-line advertisements. Some entrepreneurs have used Meta’s choices to tweak the visible look of their advertisements with hopes of gaining traction with sure audiences, CNBC reported in December.
Based in 2022, MagicBrief has 14 workers and is predicated in Canva’s hometown of Sydney, Australia. In 2023, the corporate introduced a $2 million funding spherical, with investments from Archangel and Blackbird, which was Canva’s first investor. The startup has tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in annualized income, Obrecht mentioned.
Canva, which began up in 2013, has 5,500 workers, with over $3 billion in annualized income. It is one of many corporations that enterprise capitalists are most enthusiastic about as an IPO candidate, however Obrecht mentioned there will not be an providing this yr.
The main focus, he mentioned, is successful “over the subsequent 10 years,” and never simply hitting quarterly numbers.
“We really feel that is very short-sighted, and public markets do gravitate you extra to quarter-on-quarter efficiency,” he mentioned.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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