Canva Expands Suite with Acquisition of Animation and Marketing Startups
On Monday, Canva, a leading creative suite maker, announced the acquisition of Cavalry and Mango AI, two innovative startups focusing on animation and ad performance improvement respectively. The acquisitions signify Canva’s commitment to broaden its service portfolio and enhance its offerings to its burgeoning user base. The two acquisitions are expected to be instrumental in expanding the capabilities of Canva’s professional creative editing suite, Affinity.
Cavalry: Adding Motion Editing to Canva’s Suite
UK-based Cavalry specializes in 2D motion animation across various verticals including advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva intends to integrate Cavalry’s tooling into Affinity, which it acquired in 2024. Affinity is a creative editing suite by Canva that offers photo, vector, and layout editing services.
Last year, Canva revamped Affinity’s design and made it available for free to all users. Since then, the software has been downloaded more than five million times. The addition of Cavalry’s motion editing capabilities is expected to augment Affinity’s already robust suite of tools. “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,” Canva stated in a recent blog post.
Mango AI: Enhancing Canva’s Marketing Products
In addition to Cavalry, Canva has also acquired MangoAI, a stealth startup dedicated to building reinforcement learning systems to optimize video ad performance. According to Canva, MangoAI’s first product has been helping clients create and launch ads and observe outcomes to enhance future campaigns.
MangoAI was co-founded by Nirmal Govind, previously a Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Following the acquisition, Govind will assume the role of Canva’s first Chief Algorithms Officer, while Misra will focus on improving Canva’s marketing products.
In January 2025, Canva also acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief and later launched Canva Grow, an asset creation and performance measurement tool, to further strengthen its position in the market.
MangoAI Co-Founders Nirmal Govind (left) and Vinith Misra (right) together with Canva Co-Founder and COO, Cliff Obrecht (centre).Image Credits: Canva
Canva’s Future Plans
During a recent interview at Web Summit Qatar, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht revealed that Canva Grow is already performing incredibly well, particularly in the creation of static content and its publication on Meta platforms. Although it is still an early product, Obrecht hinted at the launch of more video creation services and multi-platform deployments in the near future.
These acquisitions form part of Canva’s strategy to strengthen its position as a comprehensive marketing solution by potentially adding video creation and more granular measurement capabilities. By the close of 2025, Canva had an impressive $4 billion in annualized revenue with over 265 million users and 31 million paid users.
For more information about Canva’s acquisitions and future plans, click here.
