Canva acquires startups engaged on animation and advertising

On Monday, artistic suite maker Canva introduced the twin acquisition of startups Cavalry, which works on animation, and Mango AI, which works on enhancing advert efficiency.

UK-based Cavalry works on 2D movement animation for various verticals akin to promoting, advertising, gaming, and generative artwork. Canva mentioned that Cavalry’s tooling will add to the present capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s skilled artistic modifying suite for photographs, vectors, and layouts, which it acquired in 2024

Canva revamped Affinity’s design final 12 months and made it free for all customers. The corporate mentioned that since then, folks have downloaded the software program over 5 million instances. Affinity has the capabilities of photographs, vector, and format modifying. With this acquisition, Canva desires so as to add movement modifying to its suite.

“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re closing that [motion editing] hole and unlocking a whole skilled suite spanning photograph, vector, format, and now movement modifying,” the corporate mentioned in a weblog submit. “Collectively, these instruments type the muse of a full-stack Artistic OS for skilled work, whereas preserving the depth and management skilled creatives depend on,” it added.

Moreover Cavalry, Canva has additionally acquired stealth startup MangoAI, which was engaged on constructing reinforcement studying methods to enhance video advert efficiency, in line with its web site. Canva mentioned that the startup’s first product helped shoppers create and launch adverts and observe outcomes to enhance future campaigns.

MangoAI was constructed by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Information Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former information scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva mentioned that Govind will grow to be Canva’s first ” Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work on enhancing Canva’s advertising merchandise.

In January 2025, Canva acquired advertising intelligence startup Magicbrief and later final 12 months, it launched a progress software referred to as Canva Develop for asset creation and efficiency measurement.

Throughout a sit-down at Internet Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht advised TechCrunch that Canva Develop is doing “extremely nicely,” particularly on the subject of creating static content material and publishing it to Meta platforms.

“It’s fairly an early product, however we’ll quickly be launching much more issues round video creation, deploying throughout multi platform,” Obrecht had mentioned. “So it’s very early, however it’s very a lot bought a really loyal small consumer base, however a number of massive manufacturers are spending cash, after which we’re scaling up massively.”

With the brand new acquisitions, the corporate desires to bolster its place as a advertising resolution by doubtlessly including video creation and extra granular measurement. Canva closed 2025 at $4 billion in annualized income with greater than 265 million customers and 31 million paid customers.