Canva announced the acquisition of two startups, Cavalry and Mango AI, on Monday, expanding its capabilities in motion animation and video ad performance.
UK-based Cavalry develops 2D motion animation tools for advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva aims to add motion editing to Affinity’s existing photo, vector, and layout capabilities through the Cavalry acquisition. Canva acquired Affinity, a professional creative editing suite, in 2024 and revamped its design last year, making it free and resulting in over five million downloads. “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. “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,” it added.
Mango AI, a stealth startup, was building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance. Founded by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox, Mango AI’s first product helped clients create and launch ads and observe outcomes to improve future campaigns. Govind will become Canva’s first “Chief Algorithms Officer”; Misra will work on Canva’s marketing products.
In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief. Later in 2025, Canva launched Canva Grow, a growth tool for asset creation and performance measurement. At Web Summit Qatar, COO Cliff Obrecht said Canva Grow is doing “incredibly well,” particularly for static content published 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.”
Canva closed 2025 at $4 billion in annualized revenue with over 265 million users and 31 million paid users.
