Canva acquires startups working in animation and marketing

Creative suite maker Canva on Monday announced the dual acquisition of startups Cavalry, which works on animation, and Mango AI, which improves ad performance.

UK-based Cavalry works on 2D animation for various sectors such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative arts. Canva said Cavalry’s tools will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for images, vectors and layouts, which it acquired in 2024.

Canva revamped the design of Affinity last year and made it free for all users. Since then, people have downloaded the software more than five million times, the company said. Affinity has photo, vector, and layout editing capabilities. With this acquisition, Canva wants to add motion editing to its portfolio.

“By bringing the Cavalry alongside Affinity, we close that down [motion editing] “Gap and open a complete professional suite that includes images, vectors, and layout,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of a complete creative operating system for professional work, maintaining the depth and control that professional creators rely on.”

Along with Cavalry, Canva also acquired startup MangoAI, which has been building reinforcement learning systems to improve the performance of video ads, according to its website. Canva said the startup’s first product helped customers create and launch ads and monitor results to improve future campaigns.

MangoAI was created by Nirmal Govind, former VP of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, and Vineeth Misra, former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said Govind will become Canva’s first “chief algorithm officer”, and Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products.

In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief, and later last year, it launched a growth tool called Canva Grow to create assets and measure performance.

During a panel at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and COO, told TechCrunch that Canva Grow works “incredibly well,” especially when it comes to creating static content and publishing it on Meta platforms.

“It’s a very early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot of things around video creation and publishing across multiple platforms,” Obrecht said. “So, it’s still very early, but we have a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and so we’re scaling it up dramatically.”

With the new acquisitions, the company wants to strengthen its position as a marketing solution by adding video creation capabilities and more detailed measurement. Canva finished 2025 with annual revenue of $4 billion with more than 265 million users and 31 million paid users.