Company deepens investment in professional design and appoints its first Chief Algorithms Officer to unlock new creative possibilities for teams, creators, and designers.
via GRAPHIC PLUS — Canva, the global visual communication platform, today announced the acquisitions of MangoAI and Cavalry, two companies that further advance Canva’s long-term product roadmap by bolstering its AI and professional creative suite.
These acquisitions mark Canva’s fourth and fifth in the past two years, following Affinity (2024), Leonardo (2024) and MagicBrief (2025), as the company doubles down on building the world’s most comprehensive suite of visual communication tools. By bringing Cavalry and MangoAI into its unified design platform, Canva is accelerating its investment in the technologies and talent shaping the future of creativity.
Today, more than 265 million people use Canva, including teams at over 95% of the Fortune 500. Canva’s AI products have now been used more than 24 billion times, and in 2025 alone, more than 50 million new users joined the platform as visual communication becomes increasingly central to how teams work. The company also announced it closed 2025 with more than $4 billion in annualized revenue (up 36% year-over-year), more than 31 million paid seats, and strong free cash flow for the ninth consecutive year.
| We’ve always believed creative tools should be accessible to everyone, and we’re seeing that reflected in how the design community is responding. Affinity has already surpassed five million downloads in just a few months. Now, with Cavalry joining Canva, we’re taking another big step toward helping professional designers break free from bloated and expensive tools, bringing everything from vector to motion design into one powerful creative suite. With the acquisition of MangoAI, we’re also doubling down on building powerful new products for marketing and creative teams. Building on MagicBrief, MangoAI’s algorithms and learning loops will power the next generation of our AI-driven marketing products, laying the foundations for a new era where performance data continuously improves and adapts creative in real time. Cliff Obrecht, Co-founder and COO, Canva |
Cavalry: Bolstering Canva’s Professional Creative Suite
With the acquisition of Cavalry, the UK-based 2D animation platform trusted by top motion designers, Canva is advancing its push into professional-grade creative tools. This builds on the strong momentum and demand for Affinity, which has surpassed more than five million downloads since launching in October.
Created by animators, for animators, Cavalry makes 2D animation smarter, easier and faster to produce. Joining alongside Affinity’s comprehensive tools for photo, vector, and layout editing, the acquisition significantly expands Canva’s professional design suite into a fully interoperable solution for creatives. This removes the final barrier for creatives working across separate, expensive, and fragmented tools.
| “We built Cavalry to give motion designers a faster, more flexible creative playground suitable for the demands of modern production. Canva’s platform and long-term vision make it a natural next chapter for our technology. Together, we have an incredible opportunity to redefine motion design, bringing smarter workflows that make animation more powerful, and far more accessible, to a new generation of creatives.” Chris Hardcastle, Co-Founder, Cavalry |
Trusted by companies including Amazon, Meta, Google, and Netflix, Cavalry already powers some of the world’s leading creative and technology companies. Their team brings deep domain expertise in motion and animation. Cavalry founders Chris Hardcastle, Ian Waters, and Adam Jenns, will join Canva to help shape the future of the company’s professional creative offering.
The acquisition of Cavalry marks Canva’s seventh Europe-based acquisition, joining Affinity (2024), Flourish (2022), Kaleido (2021), Smartmockups (2021), Pexels (2019) and Pixabay (2019).
MangoAI: Accelerating Canva AI with Advanced Data Intelligence
Canva has also acquired MangoAI, an early-stage US startup specialising in AI-powered creative optimisation for video advertising. With more than 24 billion uses of Canva’s AI tools to date, the acquisition lays important foundations for brand-intelligent, personalised marketing and content creation workflows.
MangoAI have built proprietary algorithms and a closed-loop reinforcement learning system for generating and launching effective video ads. Using ad platform reward signals, it automatically improves content, increasing performance and effectiveness while reducing the time and spend it takes to find what works. The acquisition builds on the creative intelligence capabilities added to Canva through the acquisition of MagicBrief last year, and will strengthen Canva Grow, the company’s suite of marketing intelligence tools.
| “Canva has built one of the world’s most impactful creative platforms. I’m excited to join the team and help shape how data, algorithms, and AI power personalised experiences across the product – supporting everyone from first-time creators to the most advanced teams.” Nirmal Govind, Co-founder, MangoAI |
As part of the acquisition, MangoAI co-founder Nirmal Govind joins Canva as its first Chief Algorithms Officer, a newly created role reflecting Canva’s deepening investment across AI research, personalisation, and in-house model development. Formerly Vice President of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix, Nirmal brings over two decades of experience building large-scale machine learning and AI systems. He’ll lead personalisation and algorithmic experiences across Canva, working closely with Canva’s AI Lab to build the future of Visual AI. Co-founder Vinith Misra, formerly a Machine Learning scientist and leader at Roblox and Netflix, will also join Canva in the role of Reinforcement Learning Lead within Canva’s Research Lab.
