Canva acquires startups working on animation and marketing

On Monday, inventive suite maker Canva introduced the twin acquisition of startups Cavalry, which works on animation, and Mango AI, which works on bettering advert efficiency.

UK-based Cavalry works on 2D movement animation for various verticals corresponding to promoting, advertising, gaming, and generative artwork. Canva mentioned that Cavalry’s tooling will add to the present capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s skilled inventive enhancing suite for pictures, vectors, and layouts, which it acquired in 2024

Canva revamped Affinity’s design final yr and made it free for all customers. The corporate mentioned that since then, folks have downloaded the software program over 5 million occasions. Affinity has the capabilities of pictures, vector, and structure enhancing. With this acquisition, Canva needs so as to add movement enhancing to its suite.

“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re closing that [motion editing] hole and unlocking a whole skilled suite spanning picture, vector, structure, and now movement enhancing,” the corporate mentioned in a weblog submit. “Collectively, these instruments type the muse of a full-stack Artistic OS for skilled work, whereas preserving the depth and management skilled creatives depend on,” it added.

Moreover Cavalry, Canva has additionally acquired stealth startup MangoAI, which was engaged on constructing reinforcement studying techniques to enhance video advert efficiency, in line with its web site. Canva mentioned that the startup’s first product helped shoppers create and launch adverts and observe outcomes to enhance future campaigns.

MangoAI was constructed by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Knowledge Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former knowledge scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva mentioned that Govind will develop into Canva’s first ” Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work on bettering Canva’s advertising merchandise.

In January 2025, Canva acquired advertising intelligence startup Magicbrief and later final yr, it launched a progress device referred to as Canva Develop for asset creation and efficiency measurement.

Throughout a sit-down at Internet Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht informed TechCrunch that Canva Develop is doing “extremely properly,” particularly in relation to creating static content material and publishing it to Meta platforms.

“It’s fairly an early product, however we’ll quickly be launching much more issues round video creation, deploying throughout multi platform,” Obrecht had mentioned. “So it’s very early, but it surely’s very a lot acquired a really loyal small consumer base, however plenty of huge manufacturers are spending cash, after which we’re scaling up massively.”

With the brand new acquisitions, the corporate needs to bolster its place as a advertising answer by doubtlessly including video creation and extra granular measurement. Canva closed 2025 at $4 billion in annualized income with greater than 265 million customers and 31 million paid customers.