Canva ended 2025 with $4 billion in annualized revenue, 265 million users, and positive free cash flow for 9 straight years. Adobe, by comparison, pulled in $6.2 billion last quarter but only grew 10%, and its stock is down 30% this year.
The gap is closing, and Canva is now trying to close it faster with two new acquisitions: Cavalry and MangoAI.
Cavalry is a tiny four-person UK studio that makes 2D animation software. It’s been quietly gaining a following among designers as a lighter, cheaper alternative to Adobe After Effects for certain work. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Netflix all have teams using it.
Canva will keep selling it as a standalone product while also folding the technology into its main platform and into Affinity, the professional design suite it acquired in 2024 and made free in October, which has since crossed 5 million downloads.
MangoAI is an early-stage US startup that does something more specific: it uses reinforcement learning to optimize video ads. The system watches how ads perform on platforms, then uses those signals to figure out what’s working and adjust accordingly.
Think cutting a video down, splicing a strong call-to-action from one campaign onto a different hook from another, and so on. Canva is plugging this into Canva Grow, its marketing tool available on the business tier at $250 per person per year.
This is Canva’s fifth acquisition in two years, following Affinity, Leonardo, MagicBrief, and now these two. The pattern shows that it’s trying to fill in gaps across the professional creative workflow, one tool at a time, while keeping prices low enough to make Adobe feel expensive by comparison.
Canva co-founder Cameron Adams made an interesting point about where AI actually fits in this strategy. His take is that generative AI gets you most of the way to a finished piece of content but struggles with the last stretch, which is the part where you need something to actually look on-brand, land with a specific audience, and perform.
That’s the gap Canva is trying to own, and it’s why tools like Cavalry and MangoAI, which handle the more precise and performance-driven end of creative work, make sense for where the company is headed.
