Today’s announcement that Canva has acquired yet another Sydney-based startup in MagicBrief is a further marker on the design platform’s journey to evolve beyond its consumer roots.
As Daniel Van Boom reported, the deal came together in a matter of hours after MagicBrief co-founder George Howes received an unexpected WhatsApp message from Canva’s Cliff Obrecht while at the airport en route to the UK where the startup was planning to expand. He went to Canva’s Surry Hills office instead, and the deal was set in motion.
Like a bowerbird picking up shiny objects to decorate its nest, Canva is methodically collecting specialised tools to seduce the enterprise market as it hurtles towards its long-anticipated public offering.
MagicBrief is an AI-powered command centre for advertising creative, built for marketers who need to crank out high-performing digital ads fast and at scale. It pulls ad data from platforms like Facebook, TikTok and LinkedIn, figures out what’s working and why, and then provides the workflows to build more effective ads using a giant library of examples to draw from.
