Canva has announced that it is acquiring two startups, Cavalry and MangoAI, as part of its push to strengthen its creative and marketing capabilities.
Cavalry, a UK-based company, focuses on 2D motion animation across industries such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva plans to use Cavalry’s technology to expand the capabilities of Affinity, its professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts. Canva acquired Affinity in 2024 and revamped the software last year, making it free for all users. Since then, Affinity has been downloaded more than five million times.
Until now, Affinity has offered tools for photo editing, vector design, and layout creation. With the addition of Cavalry, Canva aims to bring motion editing into the mix. In a blog post, the company said that adding Cavalry helps close the motion editing gap and moves Affinity closer to becoming a complete professional creative suite. Canva described this as part of its vision for a full Creative OS that combines depth and control for professional users with a wide range of creative tools.
Alongside Cavalry, Canva is also acquiring MangoAI, a stealth startup that has been building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance. According to Canva, MangoAI developed a product that helps clients create and launch ads, track results, and use that data to improve future campaigns.
MangoAI was founded by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science and Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Govind will join Canva as its first Chief Algorithms Officer, while Misra will focus on improving Canva’s marketing products.
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