The company confirmed the deals on Wednesday but did not disclose how much it paid.

Both businesses were started by brothers Chris and Mike Sharkey, who earlier co-founded Stayz. They will now take up leadership roles inside Canva, working across its AI and marketing technology teams.

With the acquisition, Canva is working to bring more of a team’s daily work into one place, building tools that cover everything from early ideas to running and measuring campaigns.

Simtheory focuses on AI systems that can carry out tasks. Its platform allows companies to build assistants trained on their own data, connect them to tools like email or customer systems, and assign real work. Teams can also design workflows where these assistants handle repeated tasks.

Ortto works on the marketing side, combining customer data with tools that let companies run campaigns across email, SMS, push notifications and in-app messages.

Canva says the system is already used by more than 11,000 customers across 190 countries, with features that allow data to update and trigger actions in real time.

“Simtheory accelerates our evolution from a design platform with AI tools to an AI platform with design and productivity tools at its core,” said Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht.

“At the same time, Ortto strengthens our ability to power the entire marketing and content lifecycle through Canva Grow, from planning and creating to publishing and optimising across every channel.”

Canva Grow is the company’s product for content creation and performance tracking. These new additions will sit alongside it.

In recent months, Canva has steadily added new companies including Doohly, which focuses on digital outdoor advertising, just weeks ago.

Earlier, it acquired Cavalry, an animation startup, and MangoAI, which works on improving advert performance. In January last year, it also picked up marketing intelligence firm MagicBrief.

The latest deals with Simtheory and Ortto push Canva further into a space long held by larger enterprise software firms. It is building tools that combine design, data and automation, instead of relying on separate systems.

The company is expected to show how all of this fits together at its Canva Create event on April 16, where it has said it will unveil what it calls its biggest product update yet.

Canva closed 2025 with about $4 billion in annualised revenue. It reported more than 265 million users and 31 million paying customers, with monthly activity up by around 20% over the year.

However, M&A deals originating from mid-market and early stage companies have changed little in decades, still driven by banker networks, static databases, and fragmented research workflows.

Buyers usually see only what is already on the market, while high-quality, off-market opportunities remain hidden. 

GrowthPal, co-founded by Maneesh Bhandari, Shalu Mitruka and Amaresh Shirsat, was built to change this dynamic.

Today, the company has closed a $2.6 million funding round to accelerate its AI-powered M&A copilot for deal sourcing and execution.

The round was led by Ideaspring Capital with participation from prominent angel investors globally.

The new capital will support product development and expand GrowthPal’s presence across the US and international markets as demand grows for faster, more programmatic approaches to inorganic growth.

The announcement comes as M&A teams face pressures to do more with less. Corporate development teams are leaner, timelines are compressed, and competition for quality assets is intensifying. 

While platforms like PitchBook, D&B, Datasite, and Tracxn have made company data more accessible, they largely stop at aggregation. GrowthPal addresses a different need by applying AI-driven reasoning to help teams identify which companies actually matter, based on strategic intent, sector context, and readiness to transact.

“M&A sourcing is where most time and effort is wasted, especially for smaller and mid-market deals,” said Maneesh Bhandari, co-founder and CEO of GrowthPal. 

“Teams spend weeks researching, filtering, and chasing opportunities that never go anywhere. We built GrowthPal to help buyers focus only on high-intent, high-fit targets and move from mandate to meaningful conversations far faster.”

GrowthPal’s platform acts as an intelligent M&A copilot. When a buyer defines a growth objective, like acquiring a specific capability or entering a new geography, the system translates that goal into a structured acquisition thesis. 

Its AI agents then scan an enriched database of more than four million technology companies using signals from public filings, web activity, hiring trends, funding history, and other indicators. 

The result is a short list of precision-fit, often off-market targets that align closely with the buyer’s mandate, rather than broad lists of loosely relevant companies.

The company was founded to address a structural gap in the market. While more than a million meaningful startups exist globally, fewer than one percent scale successfully, usually due to lack of timely exits or strategic partnerships. 

At the same time, many acquirers struggle to find the right targets efficiently, particularly for transactions under $70 million that fall below the focus of traditional investment banks. GrowthPal was created to connect these two sides by making deal sourcing proactive, discreet, and data-driven.

GrowthPal has already supported more than 42 completed M&A transactions and facilitated over 210 LOI-stage conversations across North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. 

Clients include large and mid-market enterprises, fast-growing startups, private equity-backed firms, and corporate development teams across sectors such as IT services, SaaS, fintech, and vertical software. In one case, a single client closed seven acquisitions within 18 months using the platform.

The M&A space is increasingly shaped by data abundance and decision scarcity. Teams have more information than ever, yet struggle to turn it into conviction. As acquisitions become a core growth lever for companies of all sizes, the ability to reason across signals, context, and intent is becoming a competitive advantage.

“GrowthPal is solving one of the most under-optimised parts of the M&A lifecycle,” said Naganand Doraswamy, managing partner at Ideaspring Capital. “By focusing on qualified deal discovery and using AI to compress timelines, the team is enabling a more systematic approach to inorganic growth that traditional tools cannot offer.”

Looking ahead, GrowthPal plans to extend its intelligence deeper into the transaction lifecycle, supporting valuation reasoning, deal structuring, and preparation for negotiations. 

The company’s long-term vision is to become the system of intelligence that helps teams make better M&A decisions earlier, with greater confidence and clarity, starting from discovery and extending through execution.

The deal values Manus at between $2 billion and $3 billion, although Meta has chosen not to disclose financial terms. Manus, now based in Singapore, did not respond to requests for comment at the time of writing.

The acquisition gives Meta full control of Manus’s technology, which it plans to operate, sell and embed across its consumer and business products, including Meta AI. 

This will help to secure what many in the industry now see as the most valuable layer in AI development, the execution layer, where software agents go beyond conversation to carry out complex tasks on their own.

Manus rose quickly into the global spotlight earlier this year after releasing what it described as a general AI agent. Unlike standard chatbots, the system was designed to make decisions and complete tasks with minimal prompting. 

The product went viral on X and was soon compared to DeepResearch, a benchmark tool in the sector. The company has claimed its agent outperforms that system, helping to drive both attention and controversy.

Behind the attention was rapid commercial growth. Manus became the fastest startup to cross $100 million in annual recurring revenue, reaching a $125 million run rate in under eight months. 

In 2025 alone, its systems processed 147 trillion tokens and powered around 80 million virtual computers, figures that point to unusual scale for a company so young. That pace made Manus one of the most talked-about AI agent startups globally.

Meta’s interest shows a change in strategy. While the company has spent years building open-source foundation models such as Llama, this deal reveals a goal to own proprietary systems that sit on top of those models and actually do the work. 

Autonomous agents that can research, write code and analyse data are now the next battleground, and competition is increasing fast.

The acquisition comes after a year of heavy spending by Meta, including its investment in Scale AI, a deal that valued the data-labelling firm at $29 billion. 

Competitors are not standing still. Microsoft is expanding Copilot, Google is pushing Gemini, and OpenAI is developing DeepResearch.

Manus’s background also adds a geopolitical edge to the deal. Founded in China and backed by its parent company, Beijing Butterfly Effect Technology, the startup was once described as China’s next DeepSeek. 

It later relocated to Singapore, joining a growing number of Chinese tech firms seeking to reduce exposure to Sino-US tensions. Singapore’s neutral stance and trade-friendly policies have made it a preferred base for global expansion.

Beijing had shown interest in supporting Manus, and the company maintains a strategic partnership with Alibaba to collaborate on AI models. 

Meta’s acquisition changes ownership firmly to a U.S. technology giant, a development that is likely to be closely watched in both Washington and Beijing.