Canva acquires startups working in animation and marketing

Canva, maker of creative suites, on Monday announced a dual acquisition of the startup cavalryWho works on animation and Mango AIWhich improves ad performance.

UK-based Cavalry works on 2D animation for various sectors such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative arts. Canva said Cavalry’s tools will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for images, vectors and layouts, which acquired In 2024

Canvas renewed Affinity was built last year and made 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 wants to add motion editing to its portfolio.

“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we close the (motion editing) gap and open up a complete professional suite that includes photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of an integrated Creative OS for professional work, maintaining the depth and control that professional creators rely on,” she added.

Along with cavalry, Canva has also acquired a stealth startup MangoAIwhich has been 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 monitor results to improve future campaigns.

MangoAI was created by Nirmal Govind, former VP of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, and Vineeth Misra, former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said Govind will become Canva’s first “chief algorithm officer”, and Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products.

In January 2025, Canva acquired a marketing intelligence startup Magic Brave Later last year, it launched a growth tool called Canva Grow to create assets and measure performance.

During a panel at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Cliff Obrecht, Canva’s co-founder and COO, told TechCrunch that Canva Grow works “incredibly well,” especially when it comes to creating static content and publishing it on Meta platforms.

“It’s a very early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot of things around video creation and publishing across multiple platforms,” Obrecht said. “So, it’s still very early, but we have a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and so we’re scaling it up dramatically.”

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