Canva has acquired two startups—Cavalry, a specialist in 2D motion animation, and MangoAI, which focuses on improving advertising performance through reinforcement learning.
UK-based Cavalry develops advanced 2D animation tools used across advertising, marketing, gaming and generative art. Canva said Cavalry’s technology will complement and extend the capabilities of Affinity, its professional creative editing suite covering photo, vector and layout design, which it acquired in 2024.
Last year, Canva refreshed Affinity’s design and made it free for all users. Since then, the software has reportedly been downloaded more than five million times. While Affinity already supports professional-grade photo, vector and layout editing, it lacks native motion design tools—a gap Canva now intends to close.
“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,” the company said in a blog post. It added that together, these tools lay the groundwork for a “full-stack Creative OS” for professional work, while maintaining the depth and control demanded by experienced designers.
Alongside Cavalry, Canva has acquired MangoAI, a stealth startup building reinforcement learning systems to enhance video advertising performance. According to its website, MangoAI’s first product enabled brands to create and launch adverts, monitor outcomes, and iteratively refine campaigns based on performance data.
MangoAI was founded by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, who previously worked at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said Govind will join as its first Chief Algorithms Officer, while Misra will focus on strengthening the company’s marketing product suite.
The acquisitions align with Canva’s broader push into marketing technology. In January 2025, the company acquired marketing intelligence startup MagicBrief and later launched Canva Grow, a growth-focused tool designed for asset creation and performance measurement.
Speaking at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva Co-Founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that Canva Grow is performing “incredibly well”, particularly in enabling users to create static content and publish directly to Meta platforms.
“It is quite an early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot more things around video creation, deploying across multiple platforms,” Obrecht said. “It’s very early, but it has built a very loyal user base, and a number of large brands are already investing significantly. We’re now scaling that up rapidly.”
The company closed 2025 with $4 billion in annualised revenue, more than 265 million users worldwide, and 31 million paid subscribers, signalling its continued expansion beyond design tools into a broader creative and marketing operating system.
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