On Monday, the creative suite developer Canva revealed it has acquired two startups: Cavalry, which specializes in animation, and Mango AI, focused on enhancing ad performance.

Cavalry, based in the UK, specializes in 2D motion animation across various sectors like advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva remarked that Cavalry’s tools will complement the existing features of Affinity, its professional editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts, a company it purchased in 2024.

Canva redesigned Affinity last year and made it accessible for all users at no cost. The firm reported that since then, the software has been downloaded over five million times. Affinity includes photo, vector, and layout editing functionalities. Through this acquisition, Canva aims to incorporate motion editing into its offerings.

“Integrating Cavalry with Affinity allows us to bridge that [motion editing] gap and creates a comprehensive professional suite that includes photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing,” the company stated in a blog post. “Together, these tools will establish the basis of a complete Creative OS for professional work, while maintaining the intricacy and control that professionals depend on,” it further added.

In addition to Cavalry, Canva has also secured the acquisition of stealth startup MangoAI, which has been developing reinforcement learning systems to enhance video advertisement performance, as mentioned on its website. Canva noted that the initial product from the startup assisted clients in designing, launching ads, and tracking results to refine future campaigns.

MangoAI was created by Nirmal Govind, previous Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, an ex-data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva announced that Govind will serve as Canva’s inaugural ” Chief Algorithms Officer” while Misra will enhance Canva’s marketing offerings.

In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence firm Magicbrief, and later that same year, it introduced a growth tool named Canva Grow for asset generation and performance tracking.

At a discussion at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht shared with TechCrunch that Canva Grow is performing “exceptionally well,” particularly in generating static content and sharing it on Meta platforms.

“It is still in the early stages, but we will soon introduce several more features related to video creation, spanning across multiple platforms,” Obrecht stated. “It’s quite nascent, but it has garnered a committed small user group, and many large brands are investing heavily, so we are scaling significantly.”

Through the latest acquisitions, the firm aims to strengthen its marketing position by potentially integrating video creation and more detailed measurement. Canva wrapped up 2025 with $4 billion in annual revenue and over 265 million users, including 31 million paid subscribers.