The design platform stunned Cannes Lions attendees in 2025 when it revealed plans to acquire Australian adtech startup MagicBrief, later shown to cost Canva $22.5 million. One year and four further acquisitions on, Canva returned to the same festival to unveil Canva Grow 2.0.
The upgraded AI-powered ad engine now builds creative campaigns, pushes them directly to Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn, then pulls the performance data back into Canva. Marketers get a loop where creation, distribution and optimisation all sit inside the same platform.
Canva Grow 2.0 builds directly on MagicBrief’s original technology, which focused on helping advertisers understand what creative actually worked before they built new assets. Many marketing teams were already designing ads in Canva while separately relying on MagicBrief’s guidance for what to make, forcing them to jump across tools.
Integrating MagicBrief’s capabilities into Canva means the system can now generate creative concepts, publish them to major social platforms and learn from real-world results. Performance data feeds the next wave of creative recommendations so teams can double down on what resonates.
Canva is no longer just the place where assets are designed, it is positioning itself as a closed-loop environment for campaign creation and performance feedback. That shift could pressure standalone adtech tools that only handle parts of the workflow, especially those focused on creative insights without direct publishing.
