Canva acquires animation and marketing startup

On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced a dual acquisition of animation startup Cavalry and ad performance improvement company Mango AI.

Based in the UK, Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for a variety of fields including advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva said Cavalry’s tools will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors and layouts, which it acquired in 2024.

Canva redesigned Affinity last year and made it free for all users. Since then, the company says people have downloaded the software more than 5 million times. Affinity has photo, vector, and layout editing features. With this acquisition, Canva hopes to add motion editing to its suite.

“Using Cavalry with Affinity closes the[motion editing]gap and unlocks a complete professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and 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 maintaining the depth and control that professional creatives rely on,” he added.

In addition to Cavalry, Canva also acquired MangoAI, a stealth startup 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 clients create and launch ads, observe results and 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. According to Canva, Govind will be Canva’s first “chief algorithm officer,” and Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products.

In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief, and late last year launched Canva Grow, a growth tool for wealth creation and performance measurement.

During a roundtable discussion 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 to the meta platform.

“This is a fairly early product, but we plan to soon release many features related to video creation and roll it out to multiple platforms,” ​​Obrecht said. “It’s very early stages, we have a small, very loyal user base, but a lot of big brands are putting money into it, and we’ve since scaled massively.”

With new acquisitions, the company hopes to strengthen its position as a marketing solution, with the potential to add video creation and more detailed measurements. Canva has over 265 million users and 31 million paid users, and ended 2025 with $4 billion in annual revenue.