‘Distribution is everything’: Canva’s M&A bets fall into place with advertising push
The design startup has entered a business that runs on data it has never held. Ex Magic Brief founder George Howes explains why.
It was at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2025 when Canva announced it was buying the buzzy young Australian adtech startup MagicBrief. As Capital Brief later revealed, it paid $22.5 million for the privelege.
A year and four more acquisitions later, Canva returned to the high profile but beleaguered festival to launch Canva Grow 2.0: an updated AI-driven ad engine that generates creative campaigns, publishes them to Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn, and pulls the performance data back in to shape the next round of output.
George Howes, who founded MagicBrief and now runs Grow, told Capital Brief that bringing the startup’s tech into Canva “really was a case of closing the loop,” so that marketers could act on what was working without switching tools to do it.
“A lot of these teams were already working in Canva when it came to creating the asset, but they were using the guidance from MagicBrief,” he said.
