Canva acquires startups working in animation and marketing

On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced a double acquisition of startups Cavalrywhich works in cartoons and Mango AIwhich works to improve advertising performance.

UK-based Cavalry works on 2D animation for different industries such as advertising, marketing, gaming and genetic art. Canva said Cavalry’s tools will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional photo, vector and layout creative editing suite, which it acquired in 2024

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

“By bringing Cavalry next to Affinity, we shut it down [motion editing] blank and unlocking a complete professional suite spanning photography, vector, layout and now motion editing,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of a full Creative OS stack for professional work, while maintaining the depth and control that professional creatives rely on,” it added.

Besides Cavalry, Canva has also acquired stealth startups MangoAIwhich was working on 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 observe results to improve future campaigns.

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

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

During a session 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 Meta platforms.

“It’s a pretty early product, but soon we’ll be launching a lot more things around video creation, with development across multiple platforms,” ​​Obrecht had said. “So it’s very early, but it has a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and then we scale massively.”

With the new acquisitions, the company wants to strengthen its position as a marketing solution by possibly adding video creation and more granular measurement. Canva closed 2025 with $4 billion in annual revenue with over 265 million users and 31 million paid users.