Canva acquires startups working on animation and marketing

Ivan Mehta

Tue, February 24, 2026 at 4:39 PM GMT+9 3 min read

The Canva Inc. logo on a bag in Sydney, Australia, on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. Australian design software company Canva’s platform has gained popularity among smaller companies and Gen Zs since its inception in 2013. Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images | Image Credits:Brent Lewin/Bloomberg / Getty Images

On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced the dual acquisition of startups Cavalry, which works on animation, and Mango AI, which works on improving ad performance.

UK-based Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for different verticals such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva said that Cavalry’s tooling will add to the existing 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 for all users. The company said that since then, people have downloaded the software over five million times. Affinity has the capabilities of photos, vector, and layout editing. With this acquisition, Canva wants to add motion editing to its suite.

“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 said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work, while preserving the depth and control professional creatives rely on,” it added.

Besides Cavalry, Canva has also acquired stealth startup MangoAI, which was working on building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance, according to its website. Canva said that the startup’s first product helped clients create and launch ads and observe outcomes to improve future campaigns.

MangoAI 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. Canva said that Govind will become Canva’s first ” Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products.

In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief and later last year, it launched a growth tool called Canva Grow for asset creation and performance measurement.

_MangoAI Co-Founders Nirmal Govind (left) and Vinith Misra (right) together with Canva Co-Founder and COO, Cliff Obrecht (centre).I_mage Credits: Canva

During a sit-down at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that Canva Grow is doing “incredibly well,” especially when it comes to creating static content and publishing it 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 had said. “So it’s very early, but it’s very much got a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and then we’re scaling up massively.”

With the new acquisitions, the company wants to bolster its position as a marketing solution by potentially adding video creation and more granular measurement. Canva closed 2025 at $4 billion in annualized revenue with more than 265 million users and 31 million paid users.

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