Canva has confirmed the acquisition of MangoAI and Cavalry as part of a push to extend its artificial intelligence capabilities and strengthen its professional creative offering. The company said the two deals will expand its professional creative suite and enhance its AI and content marketing tools, as Canva continues to reposition itself as a broader platform for visual communication.
The acquisitions follow Canva’s recent efforts to move beyond its roots as an everyday design tool. Since launching in 2013, the company has widened its focus to serve teams, creators and professional designers, as visual content becomes more central to communication and marketing. Canva said the addition of MangoAI and Cavalry strengthens both intelligent systems that support content performance and advanced tools that give professional users greater control over creative output.
MangoAI will be integrated into Canva’s content marketing products, adding expertise in data intelligence and reinforcement learning. The company’s technology links creative production with performance outcomes, allowing teams to generate video advertising and then refine output based on real-world results. Canva said this approach connects insight, performance and creation in a continuous loop, particularly when combined with MagicBrief, which it has also incorporated into its marketing toolkit.
As part of the MangoAI deal, former Netflix Vice President of Data Science Nirmal Govind will join Canva as its first Chief Algorithms Officer. Canva said Govind will lead personalisation and algorithmic experiences across the platform, working alongside the Canva AI Lab to develop what it described as the next phase of Visual AI. Vinith Misra will also join Canva’s Research Lab as Reinforcement Learning Lead, bringing experience from Netflix and Roblox to support the development of future AI-driven products for creative and marketing teams.
Canva said the scale of adoption of its AI tools has grown rapidly over the past year, with its tools used more than 24 billion times to generate presentations, convert documents, create video content and distribute material across multiple channels. The company said the next phase of AI development would focus less on speed alone and more on systems that learn from performance data, understand context and improve content quality over time.
The acquisition of Cavalry is intended to strengthen Canva’s professional creative suite, particularly in motion design. Cavalry, based in the UK, develops a modern 2D animation and motion design tool that is used by professional designers. Canva said motion has become central to how brands communicate, from social media campaigns and product launches to enterprise marketing and AI-supported storytelling, yet many teams still rely on fragmented workflows across several platforms to complete advanced motion projects.
Cavalry will join Affinity within Canva’s ecosystem. Canva acquired Affinity in 2024, adding professional photo editing, vector design and layout tools to its portfolio. The company said the new version of Affinity has recorded more than five million downloads since October, which it views as evidence of demand for alternatives to higher-cost and fragmented legacy software. With the addition of Cavalry, Canva said its professional suite will now span photo, vector, layout and motion editing, creating what it describes as a more complete creative operating system for professional designers.
Canva said Cavalry’s founders and team will join the company, with their expertise in professional motion workflows continuing to guide the product’s direction. The company added that their role will be central to shaping the future of professional animation tools within Canva’s wider creative platform.
The company said the two acquisitions reflect wider changes in how creative work is produced and distributed, as motion becomes a core part of storytelling and AI tools increasingly shape how content moves from concept to execution. Canva said it intends to continue building tools that combine intelligent systems with professional-grade creative control, as it expands its reach among design teams, marketers and enterprise users.
The deals with MangoAI and Cavalry form part of Canva’s broader strategy to build a full creative suite that brings together creation, performance insight and AI-led personalisation within a single platform. The company said further updates to its professional and AI products are expected as the newly acquired teams and technologies are integrated.
