Canva buys Australian ad tech firm Doohly for $20.8m

Canva has acquired Doohly, a Melbourne adtech company that runs digital information and ad screens in offices and retail sites, in a deal valued at about AU$30 million (US$20.8 million).

The move comes as it expands beyond design software ahead of its annual Canva Create event in Los Angeles next month. The price was reported by Capital Brief.

Regulatory filings show Doohly co-founder and CEO Sean Law held over 45% while co-founder and CFO Tom Hawkins held 14%.

Skalata Ventures and Archangel Ventures owned 17% and 8%, respectively, and Doohly’s customers include Mitre 10, Rebel Sport, Mobil, LiquorLand, and Darwin International Airport.

Canva said the deal closed about two weeks ago, with Doohly staff moving to Canva, following its February purchases of UK animation firm Cavalry and US marketing startup MangoAI.

🔗 Source: The Australian Financial Review

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Canva buys a fuller marketing workflow, not just a screen company

Canva wants to cover the full marketing and content lifecycle, from ideation and creation through deployment, measurement, and optimisation 1.
Doohly adds an end-to-end digital out-of-home (DOOH) ad management platform. It includes a cloud-based, data-driven content management system (CMS) that lets businesses schedule screen content and track ad performance 1.
Doohly’s founders came up with the product after spotting a gap while working at Vicinity Centres, an Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)-listed retail property group 1.
Doohly says its software cuts day-to-day work, including less time spent on scheduling. It uses the example, “What used to take hours of scheduling now takes minutes” 2.

Canva’s acquisitions build toward an automated, self-optimizing marketing platform

The deal fits Canva’s push for a vertically integrated platform that links creative design with business performance 3.
Canva acquired MangoAI in February. MangoAI brings algorithms and learning loops for creative content optimisation, with the goal of improving content using real performance data. Third-party coverage describes MangoAI’s method as reinforcement-learning-based 3.
Canva named Nirmal Govind, formerly vice president of data science & engineering at Netflix, as its first chief algorithms officer 4.
Canva is pairing professional design tools like Affinity with marketing intelligence features, including those gained via MagicBrief. The combined offering moves Canva past creative software into an end-to-end creative-and-marketing platform 4.