Canva finds the basics that work for graphics and marketing

On Monday, suite maker Canva announced two startup acquisitions Horsemenwhich works on animation, and Mango AIwhich works for managing ads.

UK-based Cavalry specializes in 2D motion graphics for a variety of industries including advertising, marketing, gaming, and creative. Canva said that the Cavalry tools will complement the existing Affinity, Canva’s editing capabilities for images, vectors, and layouts, which found in 2024

Canvas to be changed Affinity’s design last year was to make it free for all users. The company said that since then, people have downloaded the app more than five million times. Affinity has the ability to image, vector, and edit layouts. With this discovery, Canva wants to add more updates to its collection.

“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re shutting down (motion editing) and opening up full image, vector, layout, and motion editing,” the company said in a blog post. “Together, these tools form the foundation of Creative OS full of technical services, while maintaining the depth and control that technical experts rely on,” it added.

Besides Cavalry, Canva has also found its roots in the underground MangoAIwhich is working to build dynamic learning strategies to improve video marketing services, according to its website. Canva said its first product helped customers create and launch ads and track results to optimize future campaigns.

MangoAI was built by Nirmal Govind, Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, and Vinith Misra, a former data scientist at Netflix and Roblox. Canva said Govind will be Canva’s first “Chief Algorithms Officer” and Misra will work to improve Canva’s marketing efforts.

In January 2025, Canva acquired the first smart advertising platform A magical summary and later last year, it launched a larger tool called Canva Growth for content creation and performance measurement.

During a sit-down at Web Summit Qatar earlier this month, Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht told TechCrunch that Canva Grow is doing “very well,” especially when it comes to creating custom content and publishing it on Meta platforms.

“It’s an early stage, but soon we’re going to launch a lot of video production, spread across multiple platforms,” ​​Obrecht said. “So it’s a startup, but it has a few loyal users, but the big brands are spending money, so we’re growing.”

With these new acquisitions, the company wants to strengthen its position as a marketing strategy by adding more video production and more measurement. Canva is closed 2025 at $4 billion in annual revenue with over 265 million active users and 31 million paid users.