Canva has announced the acquisitions of MangoAI and Cavalry to expand its AI capabilities and professional creative suite.
These mark Canva’s fourth and fifth acquisitions in the past two years, following Affinity (2024), Leonardo (2024), and MagicBrief (2025). By integrating both companies into its unified design platform, Canva expands its technology and talent base across creative workflows.
Canva reports more than 265 million users globally, including teams at over 95% of the Fortune 500. Its AI tools have been used more than 24 billion times. In 2025 alone, the company added over 50 million users. It closed 2025 with more than $4 billion in annualised revenue, up 36% year-over-year, more than 31 million paid seats, and positive free cash flow for the ninth consecutive year.
MangoAI and Cavalry acquisition
Cavalry is a UK-based 2D animation platform built by animators for animators. It focuses on improving 2D animation workflows and expands Canva’s professional design suite alongside Affinity’s tools for photo, vector, and layout editing. Affinity has surpassed five million downloads since launching in October.
Cavalry is used by companies including Amazon, Meta, Google, and Netflix. Founders Chris Hardcastle, Ian Waters, and Adam Jenns will join Canva. The acquisition marks Canva’s seventh Europe-based acquisition, joining Affinity (2024), Flourish (2022), Kaleido (2021), Smartmockups (2021), Pexels (2019), and Pixabay (2019).
MangoAI is an early-stage US startup focused on AI-powered creative optimisation for video advertising. The company has developed proprietary algorithms and a closed-loop reinforcement learning system that uses ad platform reward signals to refine video ads, improving performance while reducing testing time and cost. The acquisition builds on capabilities added through MagicBrief and strengthens Canva Grow, the company’s marketing intelligence suite.
Leadership appointments
Co-founder Nirmal Govind joins Canva as Chief Algorithms Officer, a newly created role. Formerly Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, he brings more than two decades of experience in large-scale machine learning and AI systems. He will lead personalisation, algorithmic systems, AI research, and in-house model development in collaboration with Canva’s AI Lab.
Co-founder Vinith Misra, previously a machine learning scientist and leader at Roblox and Netflix, joins as Reinforcement Learning Lead within Canva’s Research Lab.
Outlook
With the addition of MangoAI and Cavalry, Canva expands its capabilities across animation tools, reinforcement learning systems, AI-driven optimisation, and marketing intelligence within its unified design platform.
Speaking on the acquisition, Cliff Obrecht, Co-founder and COO of Canva, said:
We’ve always believed creative tools should be accessible to everyone, and that’s reflected in how the design community is responding. Affinity has already surpassed four million downloads in just a few months. Now, with Cavalry joining Canva, we’re taking another major step toward helping professional designers move away from bloated and costly tools, bringing everything from vector to motion design into one unified creative suite.
With the acquisition of MangoAI, we’re also increasing our focus on building advanced new products for marketing and creative teams. Building on MagicBrief, MangoAI’s algorithms and learning loops will support the next generation of our AI-driven marketing tools, laying the groundwork for a new phase where performance data continuously improves and adapts creative in real time.