Canva acquires startups engaged on animation and advertising

On Monday, inventive 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 comparable to promoting, advertising, gaming, and generative artwork. Canva mentioned that Cavalry’s tooling will add to the prevailing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s skilled inventive enhancing suite for pictures, 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, individuals have downloaded the software program over 5 million occasions. Affinity has the capabilities of pictures, vector, and format enhancing. With this acquisition, Canva desires so as to add movement enhancing to its suite.

“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re closing that [motion editing] hole and unlocking a whole skilled suite spanning picture, vector, format, and now movement enhancing,” the corporate mentioned in a weblog publish. “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.

Apart from Cavalry, Canva has additionally acquired stealth startup MangoAI, which was engaged on constructing reinforcement studying methods to enhance video advert efficiency, based on 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 Knowledge 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 development software known 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 with regards to 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, but it surely’s very a lot bought a really loyal small consumer base, however a variety of large 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 answer 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.