Canva acquires startups working on animation and marketing
On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced the double acquisition of startups Cavalrythat works on animation, and Mango AIthat works to improve ad performance.
British Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for various industries, such as advertising, marketing, gaming and generative art. Canva said Cavalry’s tooling 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 revamped Affinity’s design last year and made it free for all users. The company said people have since downloaded the software more than five million times. Affinity has photo, vector and layout editing capabilities. With this acquisition, Canva aims to add motion editing to its suite.
“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we close that out [motion editing] “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,” the company said.
In addition to Cavalry, Canva has also acquired a stealth startup Mango AIwhich, according to its website, was working to build reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance. Canva said the startup’s first product helped customers create and launch ads and observe results to improve future campaigns.
MangoAI was built by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said Govind will become Canva’s first “Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work to improve Canva’s marketing products.
In January 2025, Canva acquired the marketing intelligence startup Magic letter and later last year it launched a growth tool called Canva Grow for asset creation and performance measurement.
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 “incredibly well,” especially when it comes to creating static content and publishing it to metaplatforms.
“It’s a pretty early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot more things around video creation that can be deployed across multiple platforms,” Obrecht had said. “So it’s still very early days, but it has a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and then we scale up in a big way.”
With the new acquisitions, the company aims to strengthen its position as a marketing solution by potentially adding video creation and more detailed measurement. Canva ended 2025 with $4 billion in annualized revenue, with more than 265 million users and 31 million paid users.
