Canva Expands Creative OS With Cavalry and MangoAI Acquisitions

New updates have been reported about Canva.

Canva is deepening its push into professional creative and marketing workflows with the acquisitions of 2D motion animation startup Cavalry and ad-optimization startup MangoAI, advancing its strategy to build a full-stack “Creative OS” for professionals. Cavalry’s motion tools will be integrated into Affinity, the pro-grade photo, vector, and layout suite Canva bought in 2024 and later made free, which has since surpassed five million downloads.

By pairing Cavalry with Affinity, Canva aims to close a critical gap in motion editing and offer a unified environment covering static design and advanced animation while maintaining the control demanded by professional creatives. The MangoAI deal targets the performance side of marketing, bringing in reinforcement-learning systems that help brands generate, launch, and iteratively improve video ad campaigns based on outcome data.

MangoAI’s co-founder Nirmal Govind, formerly Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, will become Canva’s first Chief Algorithms Officer, signaling a step-up in algorithmic and AI-led product development across the company’s platform. Co-founder Vinith Misra, who previously held data science roles at Netflix and Roblox, will focus on strengthening Canva’s marketing products, particularly in data-driven optimization and ad performance analytics.

These moves follow Canva’s January 2025 acquisition of marketing intelligence startup Magicbrief and the launch of Canva Grow, a growth-focused tool for asset creation and performance measurement that is gaining traction with brands, especially for static content on Meta platforms. Co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht recently indicated that Canva Grow, though early-stage, has a loyal base and significant spend from major brands, with plans to extend into video creation and multi-platform deployment.

With Cavalry and MangoAI, Canva is positioning itself as an end-to-end marketing and creative solution that spans content creation, motion design, and increasingly granular performance measurement for video and static campaigns. The company closed 2025 with $4 billion in annualized revenue, more than 265 million total users, and 31 million paying customers, giving it substantial scale to monetize these new capabilities and potentially increase share of wallet among enterprise and large-brand clients.

For executives, the strategic takeaway is that Canva is evolving from a design tool into a vertically integrated marketing and creative platform, combining professional-grade editing, AI-driven ad optimization, and workflow tools under one ecosystem. This integrated stack is likely to intensify competition with incumbent creative software and marketing platforms, while offering marketers a consolidated environment for creative production, distribution, and performance feedback.

If successful, the integration of Cavalry’s motion engine into Affinity and the deployment of MangoAI’s reinforcement-learning models into Canva’s marketing suite could accelerate Canva’s move upmarket and support higher-value enterprise offerings. Stakeholders should watch for product rollouts around video creation, cross-platform campaign deployment, and more sophisticated measurement features within Canva Grow as leading indicators of how quickly these acquisitions translate into revenue growth and deeper customer lock-in.