On Monday, the creative suite company Canva announced the dual acquisition of two startups: Cavalry and Mango AI. Cavalry specializes in 2D motion animation for verticals like advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Mango AI focuses on using reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance.
Canva stated that Cavalry’s tooling will enhance the 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, resulting in over five million downloads. With the addition of Cavalry, Canva aims to add motion editing to its professional suite.
The company explained that bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity closes the motion editing gap, unlocking a complete professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing. Together, these tools form the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work.
Separately, Canva acquired the stealth startup Mango AI. According to its website, Mango AI’s first product helped clients create and launch ads and observe outcomes to improve future campaigns. The startup 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. Govind will become Canva’s first Chief Algorithms Officer, while Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products.
This follows Canva’s January 2025 acquisition of marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief and the later launch of its growth tool, Canva Grow, for asset creation and performance measurement. In a recent interview, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht noted that Canva Grow is performing incredibly well, particularly for static content on Meta platforms. He indicated the company plans to launch more features around video creation and multi-platform deployment.
With these new acquisitions, Canva aims to bolster its position as a marketing solution by potentially adding video creation and more granular measurement capabilities. The company closed 2025 with four billion dollars in annualized revenue, supported by more than 265 million users and 31 million paid users.