Canva is buying two specialist startups, UK-based Cavalry for professional 2D motion design and stealth outfit MangoAI for ad performance optimization, in a move that deepens its push into animation and marketing technology. The twin deals broaden Canva’s product footprint from static design into motion graphics while tying creative output more tightly to measurable advertising outcomes.
The acquisitions build directly on Canva’s 2024 purchase of Affinity, the pro-grade suite for photo, vector, and layout work. After revamping Affinity and making it free, the company says downloads have topped five million, and motion was the conspicuous gap. Cavalry’s tooling is expected to slot beside Affinity to complete a photo–vector–layout–motion lineup aimed at working designers, not just casual creators.
Motion Editing Comes To The Affinity Workflow
Cavalry is known in animation circles for fast, procedural 2D motion that spans advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Its timeline, keyframing, and data-driven animation capabilities make it a natural fit for brand assets that need to live across social video, out-of-home screens, and product explainers. Integrating Cavalry with Affinity’s file formats and asset pipeline would let teams move from static design to motion without the common handoff friction.
In practical terms, a brand could design packaging or UI elements in Affinity, then apply motion templates, rigs, and expressions in Cavalry to produce platform-ready video—replacing a patchwork of exports, plugins, and third-party render farms. The bet is not to displace deep After Effects power users overnight, but to make high-quality motion accessible to the vast middle of the market that needs speed, consistency, and collaboration.
AI For Creative Performance And Media Outcomes
MangoAI brings the other half of the equation: making creative work perform. The startup has been building reinforcement learning systems that automatically generate and iterate on video ads, observe outcomes, and improve future campaigns. Canva says MangoAI’s first product helped clients launch variants and learn quickly from real-world feedback loops.
The team’s pedigree underscores the focus. Co-founder Nirmal Govind, formerly Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, will become Canva’s first Chief Algorithms Officer. Co-founder Vinith Misra, who has held data science roles at Netflix and Roblox, will work on Canva’s marketing products. Expect approaches like multi-armed bandits and Bayesian optimization to drive dynamic creative testing—deciding, for example, which hook, caption, or cutdown wins on YouTube, TikTok, Reels, or connected TV without relying on invasive user tracking.
With privacy shifts curbing granular attribution, creative quality and contextual fit are increasingly the levers marketers can control. Industry groups like the IAB and researchers at eMarketer have consistently flagged online video as one of the fastest-growing ad formats, and tools that link creative variants to observable business lift are in high demand.
Canva’s Marketing Stack Sharpens With New Acquisitions
The company has been assembling this puzzle for some time. It acquired marketing intelligence startup MagicBrief in early 2025 and later launched Canva Grow to manage assets and measure performance. Adding Cavalry and MangoAI rounds out a workflow that spans creation, activation, and optimization—crucial for teams trying to ship more video with fewer steps.
Canva closed last year at $4 billion in annualized revenue with more than 265 million users and 31 million paid seats, according to the company. That scale gives it a rare opportunity: push pro-grade capabilities into a platform that’s already embedded in enterprises and SMBs, while keeping interfaces approachable for non-specialists. Internally, Canva has framed this arc as building a “Creative OS” for professional work.
Competitive And Product Implications For Canva
The competitive backdrop is crowded. Adobe is knitting Express, Firefly generative tools, and After Effects into a full-funnel story; ByteDance’s CapCut has become a default for short-form editing; and collaboration-first platforms like Figma continue to pull design upstream. Canva’s differentiator is a broad base of everyday users combined with a growing enterprise footprint—now augmented by motion depth and closed-loop marketing analytics.
What to watch next:
- Motion templates and timeline controls surfacing in Canva’s core UI
- A smoother handoff between Affinity files and animated deliverables
- Marketing features that auto-generate creative variants, recommend budget allocation by platform, and score assets based on observed lift
Expect early rollouts within Canva Grow customers, where integrated creation-and-measurement can show the clearest ROI.
If these integrations land well, Canva will look less like a tool for decks and social posts and more like an end-to-end marketing suite—one that starts with the storyboard and ends with statistically better outcomes.
