Canva Acquires Cavalry to Add 2D Motion Animation to Affinity Suite
Canva has acquired UK-based Cavalry, a startup focused on 2D motion animation across advertising, marketing, gaming, and generative art. And if you’ve ever felt that static design only gets you so far, you can see what they’re doing here.
Cavalry’s animation tooling will be integrated into Affinity, Canva’s professional creative editing suite for photos, vectors, and layouts. Canva acquired Affinity in 2024, then revamped its design and made it free for all users. Since that relaunch, the software has been downloaded more than five million times.
Here’s what this really means. Affinity already handles photo editing, vector design, and layout work. But motion? That was the gap. By bringing Cavalry into the mix, Canva is closing that motion editing gap and expanding Affinity into a more complete professional creative suite.
In the company’s words, the goal is to create a “full-stack Creative OS” for professional work—while preserving the depth and control that serious creatives rely on. So instead of jumping between tools for static and motion content, users could potentially do it all inside one ecosystem.
For designers and marketers juggling timelines, assets, and client revisions, that kind of integration isn’t just convenient. It’s strategic.
Integrating Motion Editing Into a Full-Stack Creative OS
With photo, vector, and layout editing already in place, motion editing becomes the missing piece of the puzzle. And motion isn’t optional anymore. Ads move. Social content moves. Brand storytelling moves.
By combining Affinity’s professional-grade capabilities with Cavalry’s animation tools, Canva is positioning itself to compete more directly in high-end creative workflows. Not just for quick social graphics—but for polished, dynamic content that agencies and brands expect.
And because Affinity was made free after its redesign, Canva is widening the top of its funnel. More users experimenting with professional-grade tools. More potential upgrades. More teams building entire creative processes inside Canva.
That’s not a small shift. That’s ecosystem thinking.
Canva Acquires MangoAI to Strengthen AI-Driven Ad Performance
Alongside Cavalry, Canva also acquired MangoAI, a stealth startup building reinforcement learning systems designed to improve video ad performance.
MangoAI’s first product helped clients create and launch ads, then observe outcomes to refine future campaigns. In other words, it wasn’t just about making ads look good. It was about making them work better over time.
The startup was founded by Nirmal Govind, former Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. That background matters. These are leaders who understand large-scale data systems and performance optimization.
Govind will step into the role of Canva’s first Chief Algorithms Officer. Misra will focus on improving Canva’s marketing products.
And that title—Chief Algorithms Officer—signals something important. Canva isn’t treating AI as a feature. It’s building algorithmic intelligence into the core of its product strategy.
Expanding Marketing Intelligence With Magicbrief and Canva Grow
This isn’t Canva’s first move into marketing intelligence.
In January 2025, the company acquired Magicbrief, a marketing intelligence startup. Later that year, it launched Canva Grow, a growth tool designed for asset creation and performance measurement.
Canva Grow is already showing traction, especially for creating static content and publishing it to Meta platforms. It’s still early, but the company plans to launch more features around video creation and multi-platform deployment.
That’s where MangoAI fits in. If Canva Grow handles creation and measurement, MangoAI’s reinforcement learning systems can potentially add deeper performance optimization and more granular measurement.
So instead of just publishing content, users could create, test, analyze, and refine campaigns inside one connected environment.
It’s a shift from “design tool” to “marketing engine.”
Video Creation and Multi-Platform Deployment Strategy
Video is clearly central to Canva’s next chapter.
With Cavalry enhancing motion editing and MangoAI improving video ad performance, Canva is building toward stronger video creation and multi-platform deployment capabilities.
Brands are spending money. Canva Grow already has a loyal user base, including large brands investing in the platform. The roadmap includes scaling video tools and expanding cross-platform publishing.
If that plays out as intended, Canva won’t just help teams design assets. It could help them create video campaigns, deploy them across platforms, measure results, and optimize performance—all within the same ecosystem.
That’s powerful for small teams without big agency budgets. And it’s appealing to large brands that want tighter feedback loops between creative and performance.
Canva’s Revenue Growth and Expanding User Base
All of this expansion is happening against a backdrop of significant growth.
Canva closed 2025 with $4 billion in annualized revenue. The platform has more than 265 million users, including 31 million paid users.
Those numbers matter because they show scale. When a company at that size starts integrating animation, AI-driven marketing optimization, and performance measurement, it’s not experimentation. It’s strategic consolidation.
The acquisitions of Cavalry and MangoAI strengthen Canva’s positioning as both a creative suite and a marketing solution—blending design, motion, AI, and analytics into one platform.
And with its growing user base and paid subscribers, Canva has the distribution power to roll these capabilities out quickly.
