Canva acquires startups working on animation and marketing

Canva announced on Monday its acquisition of two startups, animation toolmaker Cavalry and AI advertising firm MangoAI, in a move that signals a significant expansion of its professional creative and marketing offerings. The dual purchase aims to integrate advanced motion design into its Affinity suite and leverage reinforcement learning to optimize ad campaigns, positioning Canva to compete more directly with established end-to-end design and marketing platforms.

UK-based Cavalry specializes in 2D motion animation, and its technology is set to fill the motion editing gap within Affinity, Canva's professional suite for photo, vector, and layout design. Canva acquired Affinity in 2024 and has since seen over five million downloads after making the revamped software free. Concurrently, the acquisition of stealth startup MangoAI brings in a team experienced in using reinforcement learning to boost video ad performance. MangoAI's co-founders, former Netflix data scientists Nirmal Govind and Vinith Misra, will take on key roles; Govind will serve as Canva’s first Chief Algorithms Officer, and Misra will work on enhancing the company's marketing products.

These acquisitions are a deliberate step in Canva’s strategy to build what it calls a 'full-stack Creative OS for professional work.' The company is bolstering its Canva Grow tool, an asset creation and performance measurement product, by adding sophisticated video and ad optimization capabilities. Coming from a position of strength with $4 billion in annualized revenue and over 265 million users, Canva is moving beyond static design to offer an integrated ecosystem where users can not only create content but also measure and improve its market performance, intensifying its challenge to incumbents in both the creative software and martech sectors.

Canva's acquisitions of Cavalry and MangoAI are not just feature additions; they represent a strategic integration of content creation with AI-driven performance analytics. By combining professional-grade motion design with reinforcement learning for ad optimization, Canva is assembling a closed-loop marketing platform designed to challenge specialized incumbents by offering a unified workflow from initial design to campaign analysis.