Canva acquires MagicBrief to supercharge AI content performance for marketing teams

Canva has made a bold move to deepen its enterprise marketing stack, announcing the acquisition of Australian startup MagicBrief at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

The deal brings MagicBrief’s AI-powered creative intelligence tools into Canva’s design platform, allowing teams create content and then optimise it in real time based on ad performance. It marks a strategic leap forward for Canva as it eyes full-funnel dominance across ideation, creation, measurement and iteration.

“In today’s visual economy, winning brands are those that know exactly what creative works, where it works, and why,” Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and COO of Canva, said.

“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 analysis and optimisation.”

MagicBrief, founded in 2022, has already analysed more than $6 billion in ad spend and counts Fenty Beauty, Koala and Linktree among its users. Its platform scores creative performance, generates smart briefs and recommends formats based on what’s working in-market – capabilities Canva says will be embedded directly into its Visual Suite.

The acquisition comes as Canva’s enterprise ambitions accelerate. With 240 million monthly users and US$3 billion in annual revenue, the company is pushing hard into the marketing and creative operations space – a segment previously dominated by Adobe and specialist martech tools.

While financial terms were not disclosed, the acquisition aligns with Canva’s broader AI strategy: bringing real-time feedback loops into the design process to reduce wasted creative effort and drive business results.

MagicBrief will continue to operate independently in the near term, with its tech and team integrating into Canva’s product roadmap. Co-founder and CEO George Howes said the move “takes our vision to the next level.”

"We started MagicBrief to give creative teams smarter tools to move faster and make better work,” Howes said. “Joining Canva takes that vision to the next level - helping us reach more marketers and turn great ideas into high performing creative."

Why this matters for marketers

Canva is increasingly positioning itself as more than a design tool – it is evolving into an intelligent content platform that serves both creators and strategists.

For CMOs, the MagicBrief integration promises smarter briefing and faster iteration cycles for performance creative, embedded AI insights that eliminate guesswork and manual A/B testing and a single source of truth across creative, media and performance data.

The timing also reflects a broader Cannes trend: AI isn’t just powering creativity, it is being tied directly to marketing outcomes.

As teams grapple with content overload and rising performance pressure, Canva’s move underscores a growing demand for tools that can do both – create and optimise.