Canva has acquired Melbourne-based digital out-of-home advertising startup Doohly for $30 million as the Australian design software giant accelerates its push into the broader marketing technology stack.
The deal, which has not yet been publicly announced, is the latest in a rapid sequence of acquisitions by the $66 billion design unicorn, which has been systematically buying its way across the creative and marketing workflow.
Less than a month ago, Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht announced the company had acquired Cavalry, a UK-based professional motion and animation software company, and MangoAI, a US-based artificial intelligence company building algorithms and learning loops for creative content optimisation.
“This builds on our acquisition of [Australian advertising startup] MagicBrief and accelerates our goal of powering the entire marketing and content lifecycle,” Obrecht wrote on LinkedIn at the time, “bringing us closer to a world where every piece of content automatically improves based on real performance data.”
Doohly slots into that picture as the physical-world distribution layer — and marks the first time Canva has moved into the out-of-home advertising space.
A Canva spokesperson confirmed the acquisition when contacted by Capital Brief and said it formed part of its strategy to move beyond design to powering the “entire marketing and content lifecycle, from ideation and creation to deployment, measurement, and optimisation.”
“We’re excited to welcome Doohly to Canva as part of this focus. They’ve built a strong platform loved by customers globally, building on our recent acquisitions of MagicBrief and MangoAI. We’ll have more to share on this later in the year.”
M&A spree
In less than two years, Canva has snapped up generative AI platform Leonardo.ai for an estimated $320 million, paid $22.5 million for Sydney creative intelligence startup MagicBrief, acquired UK design suite Affinity, and now added Cavalry, MangoAI and Doohly in quick succession.
Each deal has extended Canva’s reach further along the marketing workflow: from creation, to performance analytics, to professional motion design, to AI-driven content optimisation, and now to real-world screen delivery.
Doohly was founded in March 2020 by Sean Law and Tom Sawkins, who met while working at ASX-listed retail property group Vicinity Centres.
It has raised just under $2 million in total across a series of small rounds. Its most recently announced capital raise — a pre-seed of $500,000 led by Melbourne accelerator-investor Skalata Ventures alongside Archangel Ventures — was in April 2024. Despite the modest fundraising, it had built a product with market traction.
Its hardware-agnostic, content management system for digital out-of-home screens has been running across thousands of screens in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom, with clients including Mobil, Rebel Sport, KX Pilates, Lendlease and SkyBus.
In November 2025, Doohly announced a formal integration with Canva, allowing users to create and publish content directly from within Doohly’s platform using Canva’s design tools.
For Doohly’s backers, the $30 million exit represents a meaningful outcome on modest capital deployed.
Skalata, which led the pre-seed and holds preference shares in the company, and Archangel Ventures, which also participated across multiple share classes, are set to realise returns on a total investment that never exceeded $750,000 from any single raise.
The ASIC share register shows a relatively clean cap table, with Law and his associated entities holding a significant proportion of ordinary shares, and Sawkins holding shares through the Sawkins Holdings vehicle.