Startups & Funding
Canva acquires Cavalry and MangoAI to expand creative suite
Canva has acquired animation startup Cavalry and AI-focused MangoAI to expand its professional creative suite, following a year-end close of $4 billion in annualized revenue.
On Monday, creative suite maker Canva announced the dual acquisition of U.K.-based animation startup Cavalry and stealth startup MangoAI. The acquisitions are part of Canva’s strategy to build what it calls a “Creative OS”—Canva’s strategic vision for a full-stack professional suite. Under this strategy, Canva plans to integrate Cavalry’s 2D motion animation tooling into Affinity, the professional creative editing suite Canva acquired in 2024.
In a company blog post, Canva stated: “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 added that these tools “form the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work, while preserving the depth and control professional creatives rely on.”
The second acquisition, MangoAI, specializes in reinforcement learning for video ad performance. MangoAI’s founders will join Canva to advance its marketing and algorithmic capabilities. Nirmal Govind, a former Netflix executive, will become Canva’s first chief algorithms officer, while Vinith Misra, a former Netflix and Roblox data scientist, will work on improving Canva’s marketing products. This dual acquisition follows Canva’s January 2025 acquisition of marketing intelligence startup MagicBrief, signaling a continued push to consolidate professional creative and marketing workflows.
The acquisitions come as Canva continues to scale its user base and financial performance. The company’s growth metrics include:
- Annualized revenue of $4 billion at the end of 2025
- Over 5 million downloads of its Affinity software
- 265 million total users
- 31 million paid users
During an interview at Web Summit Qatar, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht stated that the company’s growth tool for asset creation and performance measurement, Canva Grow, is performing well, particularly for static content on Meta platforms. “It is quite an early product, but we’ll soon be launching a lot more things around video creation, deploying across multi-platform,” Obrecht said. He added: “So it’s very early, but it’s very much got a very loyal small user base, but a lot of big brands are spending money, and then we’re scaling up massively.”
Why it matters
Canva is expanding beyond basic design tools to build a full-stack Creative OS—its strategic vision for a professional suite—by acquiring specialized startups to bridge gaps in motion editing and AI-driven ad performance.