Canva acquires startups working on animation and marketing

On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced the dual acquisitions of startups Cavalry, which works on animation, and Mango AI, which works on improving ad performance.

UK-based Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for various sectors such as advertising, marketing, gaming and generative art. Canva said Cavalry’s tooling will enhance the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional 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. 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 looks to add motion editing to its suite.

“By bringing Cavalry together with Affinity, we are closing [motion editing] closing the gap and unlocking an entire professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now 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 preserving the depth and control that professional creatives rely on.

In addition to Cavalry, Canva has also acquired stealth startup MangoAI, which was working on building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance, according to its website. Canva said the startup’s first product helped customers create and launch ads and observe results to improve future campaigns.

MangoAI was created by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, and Vineeth Mishra, former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said Govind will become Canva’s first “chief algorithms officer” and Mishra 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 for asset creation and performance measurement.

During a meeting at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that Canva Grow is doing “incredibly well,” especially when it comes to creating static content and publishing it on the meta platform.

Obrecht said, “This is a fairly early product, but we will be launching many more things around video creation soon that will be deployed across multi platforms.” “So it’s very early, but it has a very loyal small user base, but there are a lot of big brands spending money, and then we’re growing to scale.”

With the new acquisitions, the company looks to strengthen its position as a marketing solution by potentially adding video creation and more detailed measurement. Canva’s annual revenue is set to hit $4 billion in 2025 with over 265 million users and 31 million paid users.