Canva acquires next-gen motion graphics tool Cavalry

Canva has acquired Cavalry, Scene Group’s motion design and 2D animation software. The financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but the Cavalry team has joined Canva.

Canva says that the acquisition fills in an “important piece missing from the puzzle” for its Affinity professional creative tools, which it made available free last year.

In separate news, Canva has also acquired data intelligence firm MangoAI.

A next-gen 2D motion graphics tool inspired by 3D software
First released in 2020, Cavalry is a procedural animation app “combining the power and flexibility of 3D with the ease of use of 2D”.

Although currently a pure 2D animation tool, it supports workflows that will be familiar to 3D animators, including keyframing, curve editing, deformation, rigging, scattering and instancing.

The developers’ backgrounds are also in 3D motion graphics: the team is a spin-off from Mainframe North, which developed MASH, Maya’s motion graphics toolset.

You can get a feel for what it can do in our story on Cavalry 2.5.

The ‘missing piece’ in the Affinity puzzle
Cavalry is the latest professional design tool to be acquired by Canva, following its buyout of Serif’s Affinity applications in 2024.

Last year, Canva merged the tools – Affinity Photo for image editing, Affinity Designer for vector design, and Affinity Publisher for page layout – into one application, and made it available free.

In its announcement, Canva describes its latest acquisition as providing an “important piece … missing from the puzzle”.

“By bringing Cavalry alongside Affinity, we’re closing that gap and unlocking a complete professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing.”

“Together, these tools form the foundation of a full-stack Creative OS for professional work, while preserving the depth and control professional creatives rely on.”

Will Cavalry be integrated into Affinity?
The announcement doesn’t say whether Canva plans to integrate Cavalry into its Affinity software, or maintain it as a separate product.

The old standalone Affinity applications now form the basis of Affinity’s Pixel, Vector and Layout ‘Studios’, so it’s easy to envisage Cavalry becoming an integrated motion design workspace.

However, it would be presumably be harder to integrate a third-party code base into Affinity than it was to unify the original tools, which were all developed by the same team.

Will Cavalry remain a professional motion design tool?
Although Canva’s own tools are also aimed at non-specialist designers, particularly marketers and social media influencers, Canva says that it intends to keep Cavalry as a specialist, professional toolset, as it has so far with Affinity.

In a separate blog post, Canva comments that “Cavalry earned its place in the motion design world by doing something different.

“We’ve invested in Cavalry because of its depth as a professional-grade motion tool. The goal isn’t to simplify what makes it powerful, but to support and strengthen it.”

The Cavalry developers have now joined Canva and “will continue shaping the product’s direction, in keeping the founders’ vision, but now with bigger investment and scale”.

In a post on LinkedIn, one of those founders, former Scene Group CMO Adam Jenns, says:

“Rest assured this will be absolute rocket fuel for Cavalry’s growth, providing us with the resources to expand our small team and accelerate our roadmap. Canva’s commitment is to preserve and strengthen Cavalry as a professional motion tool … not simplify or dilute it.”

Will the price of Cavalry change?
Cavalry is currently available as both a paid Pro subscription and a free edition, the latter limited to HD resolution and lacking some advanced tools.

Canva says that “everything that is free in Cavalry today will remain free”.

There’s no information on whether the pricing of paid subscriptions will change in future: Canva’s announcement says that “affordability and professional capability are not opposing ideas”, but stops short of saying that Cavalry will become entirely free, like the Affinity tools.

MangoAI: backend technology for data-driven content marketing
Canva’s other acquisition, MangoAI, falls on the other side of the business: the AI content marketing tools available in its online design platform.

Founded by former Netflix data scientists Nirmal Govind and Vinith Misra, MangoAI’s first product was designed to help generate video ads, then learn from their performance.

Both Govind and Misra have now joined Canva, as Chief Algorithms Officer and Reinforcement Learning Lead, respectively. Again, the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

What are Cavalry’s price and system requirements?
Cavalry is available for Windows 10+ and macOS 12.0+. The full software is available rental-only, with Pro subscriptions costing £192/year (around $260/year).

The free edition caps renders at full HD resolution, and lacks the advanced features in this table.

Read Canva’s announcement about its acquisition of Cavalry and MangoAI

Read Canva’s follow-up blog post on Cavalry

Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.