On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced the dual acquisition of startups Cavalry, which works on animation, and Mango AI, which works on improving ad performance.
UK-based Cavalry works on 2D motion animation for different verticals such as advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. Canva said that Cavalry’s tooling will add to the existing capabilities of Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts, which it acquired in 2024
Canva revamped Affinity’s design last year and made it free for all users. The company said that since then, people have downloaded the software over five million times. Affinity has the capabilities of photos, vector, and layout editing. With this acquisition, Canva wants to add motion editing to its suite.
“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re closing that [motion editing] gap and unlocking a complete professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work, while preserving the depth and control professional creatives rely on,” it added.
Besides Cavalry, Canva has also acquired stealth startup MangoAI, which was working on building reinforcement learning systems to improve video ad performance, according to its website. Canva said that the startup’s first product helped clients create and launch ads and observe outcomes to improve future campaigns.
MangoAI was built by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said that Govind will become Canva’s first ” Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work on improving Canva’s marketing products.
In January 2025, Canva acquired marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief and later last year, it launched a growth tool called Canva Grow for asset creation and performance measurement.
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