Canva’s quiet land grab: from simple designs to a full creative and marketing OS
1. Headline & intro
Canva is no longer just the tool you open to make a quick Instagram post. With its latest acquisitions in animation and AI-driven ad optimisation, the Australian company is signalling a much more ambitious plan: to become the operating system for both creative production and marketing performance. This matters for anyone working in design, advertising or growth, because Canva is trying to collapse a fragmented toolchain – Adobe, Figma, Meta’s ad manager, analytics platforms – into a single, AI‑augmented workflow. In this piece, we’ll look at what the deals really mean, who should be nervous, and why Europe should pay attention.
2. The news in brief
According to TechCrunch, Canva has acquired two startups: UK‑based Cavalry, a specialist in 2D motion animation used in advertising, gaming and generative art, and MangoAI, a stealth company building reinforcement‑learning systems to improve video ad performance.
Cavalry’s technology will be folded into Affinity, the professional photo, vector and layout suite Canva bought in 2024. After Canva revamped Affinity and made it free, the apps were downloaded more than five million times. Motion is the obvious missing piece; Cavalry is meant to close that gap.
MangoAI, founded by former Netflix and Roblox data science leaders, developed tools that create and launch ads, observe performance and optimise future campaigns. Canva is bringing the founders in-house, with one becoming its first Chief Algorithms Officer, to strengthen products like Magicbrief (acquired in 2025) and Canva Grow, its marketing growth toolkit.
TechCrunch reports Canva ended 2025 with around $4 billion in annualised revenue, 265 million total users and 31 million paying customers.
3. Why this matters
Canva’s move is about more than adding a few flashy features. It is trying to own both sides of the marketing equation: the creative assets and the performance data.
On the creative side, Cavalry plugs a painful gap. Affinity already covers photo editing, illustration and page layout; motion graphics have been the last bastion keeping many studios tied to Adobe After Effects. If Canva integrates Cavalry well – with timelines, rigs and effects that feel familiar to motion designers – Affinity starts to look like a credible alternative to parts of Adobe Creative Cloud, not just a cheaper Photoshop clone.
On the marketing side, MangoAI is a signal about where Canva sees growth. Design is saturated; the next big budget pool lives in performance marketing. MangoAI’s reinforcement‑learning approach mirrors how Netflix optimises recommendations: continuously testing, learning and reallocating attention. Combined with Magicbrief and Canva Grow, this can turn Canva from a static design tool into a dynamic system that not only generates creatives but also predicts which variant is worth your next euro of spend.
Who wins? Small and mid‑sized brands, agencies and creators that today juggle Canva/Figma, Meta’s Ads Manager, Google Ads, spreadsheets and dashboards. An integrated stack reduces friction and skills barriers.
Who should worry? Independent motion‑design tools, niche ad‑tech vendors, and, long term, Adobe – especially on the lower and mid‑market where price and simplicity trump legacy workflows.
4. The bigger picture
These acquisitions sit squarely in a broader industry trend: the convergence of creative tooling, AI and growth analytics into unified “marketing OS” platforms.
Adobe is already on this path with Creative Cloud, Firefly AI and its Experience Cloud for marketing automation. Meta pushes Advantage+ and automated creative optimisation inside its own ad products. TikTok owner ByteDance is turning CapCut into a semi‑professional editor deeply tied to its ad ecosystem. Figma is nudging from product design into marketing design with slides, whiteboarding and widgets.
Canva’s twist is to come from the bottom up. Instead of starting with enterprise martech and working down, it starts with mass‑market creators and SMBs and works up. Affinity and Cavalry are the professional Trojan horse: win over serious designers who previously dismissed Canva as a toy, while MangoAI and Grow monetise at the marketing level.
Historically, we’ve seen this playbook in creative software. Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia consolidated web and motion tools; buying Omniture gave it a data and analytics arm. Canva is effectively replaying that strategy in a cloud‑native, AI‑first era – but with a freemium distribution engine that Adobe never had.
The other big picture piece is AI. MangoAI’s reinforcement learning for ads sits alongside Canva’s existing generative features (background removal, text‑to‑image, layout suggestions). The more of the creative and campaign lifecycle Canva controls, the more behavioural data it collects – which feeds back into better AI models. That flywheel is strategically powerful, but also where the thorniest regulatory questions will appear.
5. The European / regional angle
For Europe, this story cuts two ways.
On one hand, European talent and IP are central to Canva’s strategy. Serif (Affinity) and Cavalry are UK‑based; Canva is effectively assembling its “Creative OS” on top of European‑built professional tools. That’s a testament to the region’s design‑software strengths but also a reminder of how often European companies end up as components in non‑European platforms rather than global category leaders in their own right.
On the other hand, MangoAI’s data‑driven ad optimisation runs straight into Europe’s regulatory guardrails. Under GDPR, any system that profiles users and influences automated decisions about them – like which ad to show, at what price – triggers strict consent, transparency and data‑minimisation requirements. The EU’s AI Act goes further, framing certain forms of behavioural targeting and manipulation as high‑risk.
If Canva wants to sell a full marketing stack in Europe, it will need crystal‑clear explanations of what data is processed, where it’s stored, and how its models make decisions. That’s a different bar than in the US or many Asian markets.
For European SMEs and agencies, the appeal is obvious: a cheaper, easier alternative to the sprawling US martech landscape. But dependence on one global platform always has a cost – whether in pricing power, data portability or negotiating leverage.
6. Looking ahead
Over the next 12–24 months, expect three things.
First, Canva will roll out native motion and video features tightly integrated into both Affinity and the core Canva editor. The goal will be to make animated ads as easy as static social posts today: templates, pre‑built transitions, AI‑assisted keyframes and one‑click exports to Meta, TikTok, YouTube and programmatic platforms.
Second, MangoAI’s capabilities will surface inside Canva Grow as “smart” suggestions: automatically generated creative variants, predicted performance scores before launch, budget‑allocation recommendations and continuous learning loops across campaigns. If Canva can credibly say “use these three variants, they’re 25% more likely to convert on Instagram in Germany”, it changes how non‑experts run campaigns.
Third, regulators and large customers will start asking harder questions. How explainable are these algorithms? Can a brand opt out of cross‑client learning? What happens if AI‑optimised creatives systematically exploit vulnerable audiences, running afoul of the DSA or national advertising rules?
There is also execution risk. Integrating complex animation software into a mass‑market tool without oversimplifying it is hard. So is embedding sophisticated RL systems into a UI that marketers actually understand. If Canva gets either wrong, professionals will stick with Adobe and performance marketers with specialist tools.
7. The bottom line
Canva’s acquisitions of Cavalry and MangoAI show a company that no longer wants to be “the simple design tool”, but the place where creative production and marketing performance converge. If it executes well, Canva could become the default OS for non‑Adobe creatives and growth teams – especially outside the US enterprise bubble. The open question is whether Europe will simply consume this stack, or insist on stronger rules, alternatives and bargaining power in the new AI‑driven marketing era.
