Canva acquires Cavalry and Mango AI to build a full-stack creative and marketing OS

Canva

• Canva acquires Cavalry for 2D motion animation integration
• Mango AI acquisition boosts Canva's marketing intelligence tools
• Cavalry tools to enhance Affinity suite with motion editing

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Design platform Canva is expanding its professional toolkit with two strategic acquisitions aimed at deepening both creative production and marketing performance.

On Monday, the company confirmed it has acquired UK-based animation startup Cavalry, alongside stealth ad-tech venture Mango AI.

Motion Editing Joins the Suite

Cavalry specialises in 2D motion animation for advertising, marketing, gaming and generative art. Canva says the startup’s tooling will integrate into Affinity, its professional editing software covering photo, vector and layout design.

Canva acquired Affinity in 2024 and overhauled it last year, making it free for users. Since then, the suite has been downloaded more than five million times. With Cavalry now onboard, Canva plans to close what it describes as the “motion editing gap”, adding animation capabilities to round out the professional stack.

In a blog post, the company said combining Cavalry with Affinity unlocks “a complete professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing,” forming the backbone of what it calls a full-stack Creative OS.

AI for Ad Performance

The second acquisition, Mango AI, pushes Canva further into marketing intelligence. The startup was developing reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance, helping clients create campaigns, track results and refine future outputs.

Mango AI was founded by Nirmal Govind, formerly Vice President of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, who previously worked as a data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Govind will become Canva’s first Chief Algorithms Officer, while Misra will focus on enhancing Canva’s marketing products.

The move builds on Canva’s earlier acquisition of Magicbrief in January 2025 and the launch of Canva Grow, a tool designed to help brands create assets and measure performance.

Speaking at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht described Canva Grow as “incredibly well received,” particularly for static content published to Meta platforms. He hinted that expanded video creation and multi-platform deployment tools were on the way.