Canva, the design software giant, has announced a dual acquisition, which indicates its ambitious move in professional motion design and marketing-performance powered by AI. The company has announced it is buying animation startup Cavalry in the United Kingdom and stealth ad-tech company Mango AI, and reinforced its goals to be a full-stack creative and marketing operating system.
These acquisitions have been made back-to-back, a broader idea of Canva: go beyond design tools and create an all-in-one ecosystem that helps the professional through the whole creative and marketing process – creating assets to optimize a campaign.
Headquartered in the UK, the company cavalry focuses on 2D motion animation equipment available in areas like advertising, marketing, games, and generative art. Startup has developed a reputation of providing procedural workflows in animation to provide designers with more control and flexibility. Canva intends to incorporate the motion features of Cavalry in Affinity, its professional creative editing program.
Affinity, recently purchased by Canva in 2024, is a company that deals with professional-level tools in photo editing, in illustration (vectors) and layout design. Following the purchase of Affinity, Canva restructured the package and made it free to everyone last year. It was a great decision that led to success – in less than five months, the company has counted over five million downloads since the relaunch of the platform. Canva intends to address what it claims is a gap in motion editing within its professional product by incorporating motion editing capabilities of Cavalry.
In one of its blog posts, the company detailed that adding Cavalry to Affinity opens up a full professional package consisting of photo, vector, layout, and, most recently, motion editing. Canva stressed that the integration does not only concern the addition of features, but the construction of what it terms a full-stack creative OS, a consistent system that maintains the level of depth and control that professional creatives need, but makes powerful tools more accessible.
The field of motion design has gained popularity in online advertising, social media, gaming and digital marketing. Short-form videos, animated advertising, and mobile visual storytelling are the priorities brands make on the platforms. Canva is also seeking to compete in a closer way with the established creative software ecosystems by adding more advanced motion editing.
Cavalry, as well as Canva also led the acquisition of Mango AI, a stealth-company aiming at enhancing the performance of video ads through reinforcement learning systems. As per its site, Mango AI has been working on the technology that enables brands not only to create and introduce advertisements but also to evaluate the performance of the campaigns and optimize the future outcomes with the help of AI-based insights.
Nirmal Govind and Vineeth Mishra were former chief data officers at Netflix and Roblox respectively, and they are the founders of Mango AI. In the acquisition, Govind will become Canva’s first-ever Chief Algorithm Officer, a newly designed position that underscores increasingly increasing emphasis on AI and data science. Mishra will play a role in the improvement of marketing product features at Canva.
This will build upon an expanding investment in marketing intelligence at Canva. In January 2025 the company bought MagicBrief, a marketing intelligence startup. It also released Canva Grow, a performance-oriented tool to assist brands to generate assets and also measure performance in a more efficient manner, later in the year.
This month, at the Web Summit Qatar, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht mentioned that Canva Grow has been doing particularly well, particularly in the generation of static content and its posting in the Meta worlds. Although the product is only a few years old, it has gained some dedicated users, some of whom are key brands spending a lot of money on campaigns constructed using the platform.
Obrecht also gave hints on the future of Canva: it is going to make more videos and it will be able to roll it out on a multi-platform. The introduction of the motion tools of the Cavalry and the performance optimization technology of Mango AI are both aimed at directly supporting that vision. They also help Canva provide not only design tools, but a full-fledged marketing solution, including creative production, publishing and measuring performance.
The figures of the growth of the company support its momentum. Canva had announced that it would hit 4 billion annual recurrent revenue in 2025. It currently has more than 265 million users across the world with 31 million paid subscribers. These statistics show how Canva has grown to be a complex creative system, not only for individuals and startups but also enterprise brands through its drag-and-drop design tool.
These acquisitions are an indication that Canva is going to be at the nexus of creativity, motion and artificial intelligence in its future. Having paired professional-level editing features with AI-based performance optimization, the company is creating a platform on which both design and data live in harmony.
Since digital advertising is moving to video-first approaches and measurable results, creative teams are seeking integrated solutions that eliminate fragmentation. The recent acquisitions made by Canva indicate that the company is going to confront that demand directly – high-end users will be able to create, animate, launch, and optimize campaigns in one unified environment.
By this, Canva is not only increasing its feature base. It is reinventing itself as a holistic creative and marketing operating system that is in the AI age.
