Overview
- Canva said it bought UK-based Cavalry, a 2D animation platform, and US startup MangoAI, which optimizes video ads, with financial terms undisclosed.
- Cavalry will remain available as a standalone product, while its motion technology will be integrated into Canva’s core platform and the Affinity app used by professional designers.
- Cavalry’s founders Chris Hardcastle, Ian Waters, and Adam Jenns are joining Canva, whose materials note Cavalry has paying users at companies such as Amazon, ByteDance, Google, and OpenAI.
- Canva plans to fold MangoAI into Canva Grow—its $250-per-user business tier—using closed-loop reinforcement learning and performance signals; Canva said Nirmal Govind will become Chief Algorithms Officer and Vinith Misra will lead reinforcement learning.
- The company reported about $4 billion in annualized revenue with 265 million users, including 31 million paid, and it positioned the acquisitions as sharpening its competition with Adobe during a broader software sell-off.