Creative suite innovator Canva announced on Monday the concurrent acquisition of two startups: Cavalry, specializing in animation, and Mango AI, focused on enhancing advertising performance.
UK-based Cavalry is renowned for its 2D motion animation capabilities, serving diverse sectors such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva stated that Cavalry’s advanced tools will significantly augment the existing functionalities of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts, which it acquired in 2024.
Last year, Canva redesigned Affinity and made it accessible to all users for free. Since then, the company reports that the software has been downloaded over five million times. Affinity, already powerful for photo, vector, and layout editing, will now expand its suite to include motion editing with this strategic acquisition.
“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 articulated in a blog post. It further added, “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.”
Beyond Cavalry, Canva has also acquired Mango AI, a stealth startup dedicated to developing reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance, according to its website. Canva noted that Mango AI’s inaugural product assisted clients in creating, launching, and analyzing ad campaigns to refine subsequent efforts.
Mango AI was co-founded by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, who previously worked as a data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva announced that Govind will become Canva’s first Chief Algorithms Officer, while Misra will contribute to the enhancement of Canva’s marketing products.
These recent acquisitions build on Canva’s prior strategic moves, including the acquisition of marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief in January 2025, and the launch of Canva Grow late last year, a growth tool designed for asset creation and performance measurement.
Earlier this month, during an interview with TechCrunch at Web Summit Qatar, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht revealed that Canva Grow is performing “incredibly well,” particularly in its ability to create static content and publish it across Meta platforms.
Obrecht remarked, “It is quite an early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot more things around video creation, deploying across multi platform.” He continued, “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.”
With these new acquisitions, the company aims to solidify its position as a leading marketing solution by potentially integrating advanced video creation capabilities and more granular measurement tools. Canva concluded 2025 with an impressive $4 billion in annualized revenue, serving over 265 million users, including 31 million paid subscribers.
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