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Canva has moved to boost the offering of its widely used visual communication platform through the acquisition of MagicBrief, a fellow Sydney-based company that operates an AI-powered creative intelligence platform adopted by thousands of major brand, marketers and agencies globally.
The Canva platform, which currently has more than 240 million users and generates US$3 billion ($4.6 billion) in annual revenue, sees the move as a major step into the enterprise and marketing space by offering marketing and creative teams real-time content insights, faster iteration cycles and measurable impact across campaigns.
MagicBrief, which assists marketing teams with their storyboards, briefs and libraries of social media ads, allows its clients to analyse and inform creative development.
Canva, which is merging the MagicBrief offering with its Visual Suite, says the acquisition will bring data, insights and design together in a “unified and collaborative workflow” to create a new layer of creative intelligence that will help teams create more effective content.
“We’ve spent the last decade empowering millions of teams to create impactful and engaging visual content,” says Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and COO of Canva.
“Now, 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.
“In today’s visual economy, winning brands are those that know exactly what creative works, where it works, and why.
“By combining MagicBrief’s AI-powered insights with Canva’s Visual Suite, we’re giving every team the tools to not just create great content, but drive stronger results.”
MagicBrief was founded in 2022 by Dan Nolan and George Howes, the latter a former creative director at telehealth platform Eucalyptus.
The startup was established to transform fragmented performance data into actionable insights that help brands understand how their visual assets can engage, perform and scale.
Using AI-powered scoring, competitor recommendations and intelligent brief generation for creatives, MagicBrief’s suite of tools are said to make it easier for marketers to unlock, understand and respond to the content strategies, formats and messages that perform best.
"We started MagicBrief to give creative teams smarter tools to move faster and make better work,” says Howes, the MagicBrief CEO.
“Joining Canva takes that vision to the next level, helping us reach more marketers and turn great ideas into high performing creative."
Since launching almost three years ago, MagicBrief has analysed more than $6 billion in advertising spend and counts Fenty Beauty, Koala and Linktree among its clients.
Canva says that through the acquisition, the MagicBrief technology will help teams create content that’s “not only engaging and on brand, but continuously informed and improved by real-time performance data”.
While financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed, Canva says the deal represents a significant step in its push to expand into the enterprise and marketing space following rapid adoption of its Visual Suite by teams around the world.
Following the acquisition, MagicBrief will continue operating independently in the near term, while its technology and team integrate into Canva’s core product.
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