Canva acquires startups working in animation and marketing

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

UK Cavalry works with 2D animation for different mediums such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and production art. Canva said Cavalry’s tools will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional editing suite for images, vectors, and layouts, which it acquired in 2024.

Canva revamped the 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 graphics, vector, and layout capabilities. With this acquisition, Canva wants to add motion editing to its collection.

“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we close that [motion editing] gap and open a complete professional framework that includes image, vector, layout, and now motion editing,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of Creative OS’s full stack of professional work, while maintaining the depth and control that professional creators rely on,” it added.

Apart from Cavalry, Canva also acquired the stealth MangoAI, which has been working on building reinforcement learning programs to improve the performance of video ads, according to its website. Canva said the startup’s first product helped its customers launch ads and track results to improve future campaigns.

MangoAI was created by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said Govind will be its first “Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work to develop Canva’s marketing products.

In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief and later last year, launched a growth tool called Canva Grow for creating content and measuring performance.

During a sit-down at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that Canva Grow is doing “amazing,” especially when it comes to creating consistent content and publishing it on Meta platforms.

“It is an early product, but soon we will introduce more things in the creation of videos, broadcast in many places,” said Obrecht. “So it’s still early days, but there’s a small loyal user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and we’re growing a lot.”

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