Canva buys animation and marketing startups to expand creative toolkit

On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced it has acquired two startups: Cavalry, an animation-focused company, and MangoAI, a startup focused on improving ad performance.

U.K.-based Cavalry develops 2D motion animation tools used across multiple verticals, including advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva said Cavalry’s technology will strengthen the capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts, which Canva acquired in 2024.

Canva overhauled Affinity’s design last year and made it free for all users. The company said that since then, Affinity has been downloaded more than 5 million times. Affinity already supports photo, vector, and layout editing. With the Cavalry deal, Canva wants to bring motion editing into the same professional toolkit.

“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 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 professional creatives rely on,” the company added.

Alongside Cavalry, Canva also acquired stealth startup MangoAI. According to MangoAI’s website, the company had been developing reinforcement learning systems designed to improve video ad performance. Canva said MangoAI’s first product helped clients create and launch ads, track results, and use those outcomes to improve future campaigns.

MangoAI was founded by Nirmal Govind, formerly Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, previously a data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said Govind will join as Canva’s first chief algorithms officer, while Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products.

Canva has been expanding its marketing and growth toolkit over the past year. In January 2025, the company acquired marketing intelligence startup MagicBrief, and later that year, it launched a growth product called Canva Grow, aimed at helping teams create assets and measure performance.

During a sit-down at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht said Canva Grow has been performing “incredibly well,” particularly for creating static content and publishing it to Meta platforms.

“It is quite an early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot more things around video creation, deploying across multi-platform,” Obrecht said. “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, Canva is looking to strengthen its position as a broader marketing solution — potentially adding stronger video creation capabilities and more detailed measurement tools. Canva closed 2025 with $4 billion in annualised revenue, more than 265 million users,s and 31 million paid users.