Canva Announces Dual Acquisition of Cavalry and MangoAI

On Monday, Canva, the creative suite maker, announced the acquisition of two startups: Cavalry, specializing in animation, and MangoAI, focused on enhancing ad performance.

Cavalry: Enhancing Canva's Motion Editing Capabilities

Based in the U.K., Cavalry specializes in 2D motion animation for various industries, including advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva stated that Cavalry’s tools will complement the existing features of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts, which Canva acquired in 2024.

Canva had revamped Affinity’s design last year, making it free for all users. Since then, the software has been downloaded over 5 million times. Affinity currently supports photo, vector, and layout editing. With the addition of Cavalry, Canva aims to incorporate motion editing into its suite.

“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re closing that [motion editing] gap and unlocking a complete professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing,” the company mentioned in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work, while preserving the depth and control professional creatives rely on,” it added.

MangoAI: Leveraging AI for Marketing Optimization

In addition to Cavalry, Canva has acquired MangoAI, a stealth startup focused on building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance. According to MangoAI’s website, its first product enabled clients to create and launch ads while analyzing outcomes to enhance future campaigns.

MangoAI was founded by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Following the acquisition, Canva revealed that Govind will assume the role of its first Chief Algorithms Officer, while Misra will contribute to improving Canva’s marketing products.

Canva's Broader Marketing Strategy

In January 2025, Canva acquired the marketing intelligence startup MagicBrief. Later that year, the company launched a growth tool called Canva Grow, designed for asset creation and performance measurement.

During a session at the Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht shared insights with TechCrunch about Canva Grow’s progress. He noted that the tool is performing “incredibly well,” particularly in creating static content for Meta platforms.

“It is quite an early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot more things around video creation, deploying across multi-platform,” Obrecht said. “So it’s very early, but it’s very much got a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and then we’re scaling up massively.”

Positioning Canva as a Comprehensive Marketing Solution

With these new acquisitions, Canva aims to strengthen its position as a leading marketing solution. The company plans to expand its offerings to include video creation and more granular performance measurement tools.

Canva ended 2025 with an impressive $4 billion in annualized revenue, over 265 million users, and 31 million paid users.