Canva acquires Cavalry and Mango AI to dominate motion design
Canva announced the acquisition of Cavalry and Mango AI on Monday to strengthen its animation and marketing capabilities. UK-based Cavalry develops 2D motion animation tools for advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Mango AI was building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance. Canva intends to integrate Cavalry’s tools into its Affinity suite and expand its marketing products with Mango AI’s technology and founders.
Canva acquired the professional creative editing suite Affinity in 2024. The company revamped Affinity’s design last year and made it free for all users. Since this change, downloads of the software have exceeded five million. Affinity currently offers capabilities for photo, vector, and layout editing. The acquisition of Cavalry allows Canva to add motion editing to these existing features. The integration aims to provide a comprehensive toolset for professional creatives.
In a blog post, Canva described the integration of Cavalry as closing a gap in its product offering. “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 stated. Canva further explained that these tools combined form “the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work, while preserving the depth and control professional creatives rely on.”
Mango AI, a stealth startup, focused on creating systems to optimize video advertising outcomes. According to Canva, Mango AI’s initial product enabled clients to create, launch, and monitor ad campaigns. The system was designed to observe results and apply those insights to improve future campaigns through reinforcement learning. The startup was founded by Nirmal Govind and Vinith Misra, both of whom have significant backgrounds in data science.
Nirmal Govind served as the Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix. Vinith Misra worked as a data scientist at both Netflix and Roblox. Canva confirmed that Govind will assume the role of the company’s first “Chief Algorithms Officer.” Misra will join the team to work on improving Canva’s marketing products. Their appointments are expected to drive the development of algorithmic features within the platform.
These acquisitions follow Canva’s purchase of marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief in January 2025. Later in the year, the company launched Canva Grow, a growth tool designed for asset creation and performance measurement. Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht discussed the tool’s performance during a session at Web Summit Qatar. He reported that Canva Grow is performing “incredibly well,” specifically regarding static content distributed to Meta platforms.
Obrecht noted that Canva Grow is an early-stage product but outlined immediate expansion plans. “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. He added that while the user base is currently small but loyal, “a lot of big brands are spending money, and then we’re scaling up massively.” The company aims to bolster its marketing solution with video creation and detailed measurement.
Canva closed the 2025 fiscal year with $4 billion in annualized revenue. The platform now hosts over 265 million users. Among these, 31 million are paid subscribers. The acquisitions of Cavalry and Mango AI, combined with the growth of Canva Grow, form part of the company’s strategy to expand its professional and marketing toolsets.