Canva Bought Ortto and Simtheory to Become HubSpot's SMB Problem
Canva announced on April 8 that it acquired Simtheory, an agentic AI platform, and Ortto, a customer data platform with marketing automation baked in. Financial terms weren't disclosed, which usually means both deals were small enough that nobody needed to pretend otherwise. The interesting part isn't the price. It's that Canva just bought itself into a software category its users were paying someone else for yesterday.
That someone else is very likely HubSpot, or Mailchimp, or Klaviyo, or whichever SMB marketing tool pairs with the design tool that already sits open in a second tab.
The number HubSpot should actually be watching
Canva has around 265 million monthly active users, per PPC Land's reporting on the deal. HubSpot, for comparison, ended Q4 2025 with 288,000 paying customers after adding roughly 40,000 in 2025. The distribution asymmetry is somewhere around 900 to 1. Not every Canva user is a potential HubSpot buyer, obviously. A college student making a flyer doesn't need a CDP. But the overlap at the small-business end is enormous, and Canva now has the raw materials to convert that overlap into paying martech revenue.
Ortto brings around 11,000 customers across 190 countries, an event-driven data architecture, and channel coverage across email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, forms, and surveys. That's roughly HubSpot Marketing Hub's core feature set, minus the sales CRM and the aggressive salespeople. Simtheory adds agentic AI that can act on data instead of just generating copy, built to run workflows across multiple models.
If you're wondering why Canva needed both, the answer is that they were already sort of one product. Chris and Mike Sharkey, per TechCrunch, founded both companies. Canva bought them the same way you'd buy a preassembled shelf rather than the raw planks.
Canva has been quietly buying a GTM stack
This is the fifth major marketing-adjacent acquisition I can point to in the last 18 months or so. Canva previously acquired MagicBrief (creative performance analysis), MangoAI (generative content), and Doohly (digital out-of-home), according to PPC Land's deal recap. The pattern becomes clear once you line the deals up in order. Canva started with the asset. Then it added creative performance feedback, then automated content, then out-of-home distribution, and now both marketing automation and the AI layer that orchestrates the whole thing.
HubSpot has seen the direction and started moving too. It acquired XFunnel in October 2025 to push deeper into agentic AI. But HubSpot bolting AI onto its existing product is structurally different from Canva bolting martech onto its existing 265M users. One is a software roadmap. The other is distribution.
The founder retention piece is worth flagging. The Sharkey brothers aren't just getting cashed out. Per the Canva announcement, both are joining the company to lead AI and marketing technology. That matters, because it's the difference between a tuck-in acquisition and a platform move. Canva brought on the people who already built a full-stack martech vision, with equity incentives to go finish it inside a much bigger distribution engine.
There's a useful analogy here. What Amazon did to retail by pasting logistics onto a bookstore is what Canva seems to be trying to do to martech by pasting marketing automation onto a design tool. I'm not sure the analogy holds all the way to checkout, and I'd be careful about predicting HubSpot's market share in 2028 based on it. But the structural move is the same: use a cheaper, higher-volume product to walk into the expensive, lower-volume category next door. OpenAI pulled a version of this when it shipped its self-serve ads manager at $60 CPMs. The product didn't need to be great. The user base carried it.
The pricing gap Canva is about to close
HubSpot's average subscription revenue per customer was $11,700 in Q4 2025, per its earnings release. Canva Teams, by contrast, runs somewhere in the low hundreds of dollars per year per user. If Canva decides to package Ortto-powered automation as a $300 to $500 annual upsell to its existing Teams customers, which seems likely given how they price today, a lot of HubSpot's starter-tier and Starter Marketing Hub customers suddenly face a decision that wasn't on the table last week.
I don't think most SMBs will actually rip out HubSpot on day one. Migrations are painful and the sales teams at incumbents know how to close. But the real risk for HubSpot isn't churn. It's that Canva becomes the default choice for the SMB customer who hasn't yet bought a marketing automation tool. Every year, HubSpot's new-logo acquisition has to fight a design tool that already lives in the browser tab next to Gmail.
For marketers evaluating stacks right now, the framing that matters isn't "which product is better." It's "who ends up owning the SMB design-to-send workflow by 2028." Canva just made a credible bid.
Three moves worth making before Canva Create on April 16
Canva is unveiling the first integrated product work at Canva Create on April 16, about three days after this writing. If you work in or run a marketing team that has anything more than casual Canva usage, three things are worth doing before the announcement lands.
First, pull your team's Canva usage report. If you have 20 or more seats active monthly and also pay for a separate email or automation tool, you're the exact profile Canva is going to pitch first. Knowing your seat count and your incumbent renewal dates before Canva Create puts you in a better negotiating position with whichever vendor you'd cut. Incumbents hold terms when the market is quiet. They almost never hold them the week a credible competitor is in the headlines.
Second, pull your annual martech stack audit forward by a quarter. From what I've seen, somewhere between $2,000 and $15,000 of annual tooling spend is about to become duplicative for teams under 50 people. That isn't worth rebuilding around on April 17. It's worth knowing where the fault lines are when the integration details drop.
Third, if you're on the customer side of HubSpot, Mailchimp, or Klaviyo and you're coming up on a renewal in the next 90 days, ask about a shorter-term contract with opt-out rights rather than a locked multi-year. The product you'd be comparing against six months from now may not exist today.
Distribution beats features, and Canva has both now
Canva's bet doesn't really depend on Ortto or Simtheory being best-in-class. Ortto is a solid tool but it's not winning "best email automation" awards against Klaviyo or Braze. Simtheory is promising but Anthropic's Computer Use and OpenAI's Operator are moving faster on general-purpose agents. What Canva actually bought is the fastest possible path from "our users already open Canva five days a week" to "our users send their campaigns from Canva too."
The feature gap gets closed with engineering. The distribution gap takes a decade to close, and Canva has already done the decade.
I don't know exactly how this plays out for HubSpot, and I'd be careful assuming the SMB marketing automation category collapses into a single vendor by 2028. But I'd put reasonable odds on Canva showing up at least three times on HubSpot's next earnings call, and none of those mentions will sound relaxed.
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