Global design powerhouse Canva has announced the dual acquisition of UK-based animation startup Cavalry and stealth AI marketing startup Mango AI. The move signals Canva’s deepening commitment to building a comprehensive, full-stack creative suite for professionals, expanding its capabilities in motion design and AI-powered advertising.
Expanding the Professional Creative Suite
The acquisition of Cavalry, a specialist in 2D motion animation, is set to significantly enhance Canva’s professional-grade offering, Affinity. Canva acquired the Affinity suite of creative software—a popular alternative to Adobe’s products for photo, vector, and layout editing—in 2024.
According to the company, Cavalry’s advanced animation tooling will fill a critical gap in the Affinity suite, adding motion editing to its existing capabilities. This integration aims to create a complete ecosystem for professional creatives.
“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.
Boosting Ad Performance with AI
Simultaneously, Canva has acquired MangoAI, a stealth startup founded by former Netflix and Roblox data scientists Nirmal Govind and Vinith Misra. MangoAI focused on using reinforcement learning systems to optimize the performance of video advertisements.
This acquisition directly supports Canva’s growing marketing and advertising tools, including Canva Grow, which launched last year. As part of the deal, Govind will join Canva as its first “Chief Algorithms Officer,” while Misra will focus on enhancing the company’s marketing products.
MENA on the Radar
The strategic expansion comes as Canva continues to scale rapidly, closing 2025 with $4 billion in annualized revenue and over 265 million users. The company’s focus on building out its marketing solutions was recently highlighted in the region.
Speaking at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that its new growth tool, Canva Grow, is performing “incredibly well,” particularly for creating and publishing static content to Meta platforms.
“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, signaling that the capabilities brought by Cavalry and MangoAI are aligned with the company’s immediate roadmap.
About Canva
Canva is an online visual communication and collaboration platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere. Launched in 2013, it offers a user-friendly interface with a vast library of templates, photos, and illustrations for creating presentations, social media graphics, documents, and other visual content.
Source: TechCrunch
