Canva is bolting out of doors promoting onto its providing, buying digital out of doors promoting startup Doohly, reportedly for $30 million.
Capital Brief first reported the deal, and if the value is true, then there’s appreciable uplift for the six-year-old Melbourne adtech platform’s founders, Sean Regulation and Tom Sawkins, and buyers, together with Paul Little’s Skalata together with Archangel Ventures, who backed a $500,000 pre-Seed round in 2024.
Regulation owns practically half the enterprise and Skalata round 17%, with Sawkins holding 14%, which means they’re all doubtlessly multi-millionaires from the sale.
Regulation met Sawkins whereas working at ASX-listed retail property group Neighborhood Centres, the place they each realised a major hole out there for an end-to-end DOOH administration platform.
Doohly is an end-to-end programmatic ecosystem for DOOH (digital out-of-home) promoting, that digitises handbook processes for managing, scheduling, and monitoring advert efficiency in a cloud-based, data-driven content material administration system (CMS).
As Regulation defined it to Startup Day by day two years in the past: “We needed to alter the way in which folks show adverts in the actual world, and make it a device that not solely the large guys can use, however a device for everybody. What the iPhone did to images we wish to do to the DOOH business.”
World attain
The corporate operates within the UK, Australia and New Zealand by way of massive format out of doors screens and retail media at websites like KX Pilates, Mobil, Insurgent Sport and Liquorland.
Which means Canva can now handle a consumer’s branding from design to in-store promoting.
The Doohly deal comes only a month after the design large acquired US startup Mango.AI and the UK’s Cavalry.
This acquisition is Canva’s sixth in two years, following on from Affinity and Leonardo in 2024, and MagicBrief last year.
A Canva spokesperson mentioned the transfer was about managing “the whole advertising and marketing and content material lifecycle, from ideation and creation to deployment, measurement, and optimisation” for the platform’s customers.
“We’re excited to welcome Doohly to Canva as a part of this focus. They’ve constructed a robust platform liked by clients globally, constructing on our latest acquisitions of MagicBrief and MangoAI,” they mentioned.
“We’ll have extra to share on this later this yr.”
The enterprise was valued at $65 billion following a secondaries share sale in mid-2025. Canva topped $4 billion in annualised income final yr, and is contemplating going public with a list within the US in late 2026.
