Canva acquires startup in animation and marketing

On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced a dual acquisition of animation startup Cavalry and advertising performance improvement company Mango AI.

Based in the UK, Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for a variety of industries including advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva said Cavalry’s tools will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional and creative editing suite for photos, vectors and layouts, which it acquired in 2024.

Canva revamped Affinity’s design last year and made it free for all users. The company says people have downloaded the software more than 5 million times since then. Affinity has photo, vector, and layout editing features. With this acquisition, Canva is looking to add motion editing capabilities to its product line.

“By introducing Cavalry with Affinity, we are closing the (motion editing) gap and unlocking a complete professional suite encompassing photo, vector, layout and motion editing,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of a full-stack creative OS for professional work, while maintaining the depth and control that professional creatives rely on,” he added.

In addition to Cavalry, Canva also acquired MangoAI, a stealth startup that builds reinforcement learning systems to improve video advertising performance, according to its website. Canva said the startup’s first product helped customers create and launch ads and observe the results to improve future campaigns.

MangoAI was built by Nirmal Govind, former VP of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said Govind will become Canva’s first “Chief Algorithm Officer” and Misra will work to improve Canva’s marketing products.

In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief, and late last year it launched a growth tool called Canva Grow for asset generation and performance measurement.

At Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that Canva Grow is “doing incredibly well,” especially in the area of ​​creating static content and publishing it to meta platforms.

“It’s a very early product, but we’ll soon be rolling out a lot more functionality around video production and deploying it across multiple platforms,” Obrecht said. “It’s very early days, but we have a small user base that is very loyal, but a lot of the big brands are spending money and we’re scaling massively.”

With the new acquisition, the company hopes to strengthen its position as a marketing solution, potentially adding video production and more detailed measurement capabilities. Canva ended 2025 with over 265 million users, over 31 million paying users, and $4 billion in annual revenue.