Canva’s latest shopping spree tells you almost everything you need to know about where the design platform is headed next. On February 23, the company quietly announced it’s acquiring two very different startups — Cavalry, a professional motion design tool, and MangoAI, a reinforcement learning outfit for video ads — but together they say a lot about Canva’s ambitions to be more than a “simple” design app. It wants to be a full creative OS that can stand toe‑to‑toe with Adobe and, increasingly, with Apple’s push into creative tools too.

Let’s start with Cavalry. If you hang around motion designers, Cavalry has been on the radar as a modern 2D animation tool built in the UK, popular with teams working on advertising, gaming, and generative art. Canva isn’t just buying a cool toy here; it’s plugging the last obvious hole in its Affinity lineup. Affinity — the suite Canva picked up in 2024 — already covers photo editing, vector design, and layout, and has crossed more than 5 million downloads since the “all‑new” version launched, mostly by positioning itself as a sleek, one‑time‑purchase alternative to bloated subscription tools. Cavalry now adds proper motion graphics to that stack, meaning Affinity users can, in theory, move from stills to complex motion without ever touching Adobe After Effects.

For Canva, which has spent the last decade building its reputation as the friendly design tool for non‑designers, this is a very deliberate pivot deeper into pro territory. Motion is now table stakes for brand storytelling — think launch videos, social campaigns, animated explainers, and the avalanche of short‑form content every marketing team is expected to churn out. Until now, those workflows typically jumped between tools: maybe storyboards in Canva or Figma, editing in a pro suite, finishing in something like After Effects. By pulling Cavalry into the Affinity ecosystem and then into Canva’s broader platform, the company is trying to collapse that workflow into a single environment and keep professional designers inside its universe for much longer.

The deal is also a clear signal to Adobe. Affinity plus Cavalry starts to look like a credible challenger to the Photoshop–Illustrator–InDesign–After Effects bundle, especially for freelancers, studios, and cost‑conscious teams who resent long‑term subscriptions. Canva is careful to say it wants to preserve “depth and control” for pros — a nod to the fear that a mainstream tool will oversimplify everything — while still layering on the cloud‑native collaboration, templates, and AI features that made it popular in the first place. In other words, Canva doesn’t just want to be where the social media manager makes a quick Story post; it wants to be where the motion designer lives all day.

If Cavalry is about raw creative power, MangoAI is about making that creativity smarter. MangoAI is a US‑based startup built by former Netflix data leaders Nirmal Govind and Vinith Misra, and its focus is very specific: reinforcement learning systems that watch how your video ads perform, learn from the feedback signals coming back from ad platforms, and automatically tweak the creative to do better next time. Think of it as a continuous feedback loop for creative: generate an ad, ship it, see what happens in the real world, and feed that performance data back into the next round of content without a human having to manually decode dashboards and spreadsheets.

Canva is folding MangoAI into a broader marketing intelligence stack that already includes MagicBrief, an Australian AI platform it moved to acquire in 2025. MagicBrief focuses on insights — scoring creative, surfacing competitor examples, and helping teams understand what tends to work. MangoAI brings the “learning from live campaigns” side. Together, plus Canva’s own Magic Studio tools, the company is clearly chasing a closed‑loop system for marketers: from brief, to idea, to design, to deployment, to measurement, and then back again to new creative that’s informed by actual performance — all in one place.

There’s also a big leadership signal baked into this deal. MangoAI founder Nirmal Govind is joining Canva’s first Chief Algorithms Officer, with a mandate to lead personalization and algorithmic experiences across the platform, while co‑founder Vinith Misra becomes Reinforcement Learning Lead in Canva’s Research Lab. These aren’t honorary titles; they’re a statement that the next phase of Canva’s evolution is going to be heavily driven by data and AI, not just UX polish and template libraries. Given that Canva says its AI tools have already been used more than 24 billion times across presentations, documents, video, and other formats, the company now has the scale of usage data you’d need to make those algorithms genuinely useful.

Zoom out and the strategy starts to look pretty cohesive. On one side, Canva keeps building a professional‑grade creative stack: Affinity for photo, vector, and layout, Cavalry for motion, plus Canva’s core browser‑based design tools. On the other, it’s layering in a performance brain: MagicBrief, MangoAI, and an internal AI Lab and Research Lab that are explicitly tasked with turning all of this into “visual AI” products that don’t just help you make things faster, but help you make things that actually work better. For brands already standardizing on Canva for their everyday assets, this is the pitch: why juggle three or four separate vendors for design, motion, ad intelligence, and reporting when you can keep it inside one ecosystem that’s constantly learning from your own campaigns.

Of course, there are open questions. Motion designers are notoriously picky about their tools; if Cavalry’s integration into Canva and Affinity feels even slightly clunky or if performance suffers, they’ll happily stick with established pipelines. At the same time, marketers are wary of black‑box optimization, especially as regulators turn up the heat on how data is used across ad platforms. Canva will have to show clearly how MangoAI’s reinforcement learning works in practice, how it handles privacy and data partnerships, and how much control teams maintain over the final creative. The upside, though, is obvious: if it gets this right, Canva could be the place where a brand’s look, feel, motion language, and performance playbook all live together — and continuously improve.

In the end, the Cavalry and MangoAI acquisitions read less like opportunistic deal‑making and more like pieces of a long‑running plan. Canva spent its first decade making design accessible; its next decade looks set on making that design deeply professional and relentlessly optimized. One move strengthens the hands‑on creative tools; the other wires in the intelligence to learn from every campaign. In a market where Adobe, Apple, and a swarm of AI‑native startups are all converging on the same problem — how to help teams tell better visual stories with less friction — Canva is betting that the winning answer is a single platform that’s as comfortable in the hands of a solo creator as it is in the workflows of a global marketing org. Cavalry and MangoAI are the latest bricks in that wall, and they won’t be the last.