Canva Acquires Cavalry and Mango AI

0:00Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. Victory Lane? Yeah, it's even better with Chamba by my side. Race to chambacacino.com, let's Chamba. Don't purchase necessary, VTW Group. Boy, we're prohibited by law. CTNCs, 21 plus sponsored by ChambaCacino. Today on the podcast, we're talking about a huge acquisition that Canva has just made. They're getting into animations and marketing. This is an exciting area because Canva is something that Jamie and I both use extensively. And I actually, when I was in college, I basically went from being a Photoshop Pro to switching and using Canva because A, it was free. And B, it was cheaper. And well, it was kind of funny because at school, we had access to all of the Adobe suite at the library. But I never wanted to go all the way to the library to access the library computers. So out of perhaps laziness and being cheap as a student, I basically switched my whole life to Canva. And I've never looked back. So anyways, we're going to break down everything happening with AI and Canva today. Jamie, take it away. But first, once you tell everyone about the latest

1:02in marketing on the AI hustle school community. Yeah, so if you haven't heard of our AI hustle school community, you need to check it out. The link is below. But each week we release bonus content over there. A variety of topics from AI consulting, AI marketing. Jayden has AI music side hustle where he makes AI generated music and brings in thousands of dollars per month. And then our most recent one is AI vibe coding. We're kind of leaning heavily into that because that's really what we think is the future. So we're releasing content over there each week. And it's really valuable place if you want to learn how to actually make money using AI. So I would love to have you be a member. There is over or about 300 members right now. And we have a special price of $19 a month. It will go up in the future. So you can lock that price in today. And we'd love to have you be a member. But let's talk about Canva. I too am a heavy Canva user. I used to use Photoshop, but didn't like paying $20 a month for it. But it turns out now I'm actually paying for a premium version of Canva

2:03because I use it so much. So they got me. But Canva, this is really interesting. Their revenue growth, I just looked it up, reached $4 billion at the end of 2025, which is a 36% increase from the previous year. So and that is mostly driven by the recommendation of AI tools such as OpenAI using their tools as reference or to recommend. So they've had a 700% surge year over year. So amazing. They're blowing up a really, really big company. And honestly, they deserve it. They have a great software. It's easy to use. And yeah, so as these companies are referring to Canva more and more, their revenue is just growing and growing. And I was excited last year when OpenAI actually made a access to Canva. So it'll actually generate templates and stuff for you over in Canva. So they're actually a connected tool, which is really cool.

3:05Have you, like my question for you on that, I was just looking at that yesterday. Is that something that you've used much? Or do you feel like ChatGPT has a ways to go before they make that useful? Do you ever use the Canva integration inside of ChatGPT? That's a great point. I actually don't, mostly because I am a kind of a snob when it comes to graphic design, as I think you are too, Jayden. But since being in content creation in that world, like I want things to look a certain way. So I could maybe use it as a base for information, like if it could copy text over to Canva, but then I would still make tweaks and stuff. I don't think the AI design is necessarily there yet, but it may be in the future. So yeah, okay, I agree with you. And by the way, if you're watching on YouTube, there's a link in that there should be a link in the show notes to the YouTube video of this. If you're watching over on YouTube, so I'm sharing my screen, but for everyone else, if you just click on the plus button on the ChatGPT Chatbar, they have like a drop down and under the more section,

4:07you literally can see like Zillow and Canva, some of these connected apps, and you can add them and literally ask your question right there. And it's gonna pull up a Canva template. I also think if you add Canva as like a tool that you wanna use in your settings, then you can just reference it directly. I think you might even be able to say like add Canva. Yeah, if you say add Canva, then it will also link it. So there's a few different ways to directly link Canva in there. Now, from my personal experience, I've never been able to get it, like I've got it to make like business cards, I've got it to make like flyers, different things. I've never been able to get it to be perfect, or very incredible or impressive as far as the templates go. It does make templates, and basically it designs a unique template. And then it will, you click a link and it opens it in Canva, so you can go edit the template. And it is useful, but it's never is in my opinion, I just literally go to Canva, search on Canva for like recently, at least in my house for sale. And so I needed like a real estate, you know, flyer made for it basically. And so I just search for real estate,

5:07put all my data into someone else's pre-made template and just printed that and was happy. And that took me like two seconds, and it looked professional, and obviously a professional graphic designer or someone that's great at this kind of design, made it and that worked a lot better for me. So like, I don't know, no shade there. But you did bring up a great point, Jamie, which is that the extra visibility that ChatGPT's direct integration has had, I think really actually has boosted perhaps Canva more than anything because it's like a giant billboard every time you click and see more, you can see all of the apps that integrate. And there's a huge banner if you're on ChatGPT at the very top of the app section. And one of the very first like, you know, products that are being featured is Canva. So I think, I literally think ChatGPT is driving a ton of traffic to Canva. Now, there's a lot of different apps in their featured ones. I'll give you just a list for a second so you know who's getting linked in there. We have Photoshop, alltrailsbooking.com, Expedia, Instacart, OpenTable, Spotify,

6:08TripAdvisor, AirTable, Apple Music, Figma, Lovable, Repolate, Target, Zillow. Like a ton of big ones, those are the featured ones though they have, but Canva still is the giant banner at the top and I'm still not finding it as that useful of an integration. So anyways, it's kind of interesting. I hope they get better there. Regardless though, Canva is making big moves in the space. And like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, they've actually had a couple different acquisitions that I think are gonna help them continue to basically capture this momentum and grow. So I'm really impressed with Canva and I do love them as a tool. The first one that they acquired was a company called Cavalry. They work on animation. They also acquired a company called Mango AI, which works on improving ad performance. Now, a couple interesting things here for both of them. First of all, Cavalry, it's based in the UK, but they work on 2D motion animation. If you know anything about Canva, you know that Canva has a massive asset library on their platform where essentially they allow you to,

7:08if you have premium, you can go and get different thumbnails, images. I used to go to, I'm curious what your situation is with this Jamie, because I know you're also thinking to graphic design. We go through a lot of stuff with this. I used to go to a whole bunch of different open sort or like free kind of like anim or logo or icon websites, image websites. And I find myself more and more just using the search rate built into Canva. So I don't have to download things off another website and upload it. It may be perhaps a little limited, maybe they have less options, but I can usually find something I need and it's quicker. Do you still find yourself going to third party sources for graphics? No, I don't. I think, you know, and specifically speaking to the motion animation, I've used that in the past where if you have like a logo that you want to throw on, let's say a quick video clip, you want to have some motion to it, you can just click. And there's like a bunch of different animations. Now some of them are cheesy, but basically you put some motion to that logo

8:10and it's a little bit more engaging, a little more memorable and more, you know, high end looking. So there's some really great tools there. Plus I think, you know, I think based on these two acquisitions, they're really gonna try to lean into marketers using this to fully create ads within Canva that they can then go post on Facebook or TikTok or whatever. I think that's kind of what they're going for. Don't you think? A hundred percent. Yeah, the motion animation stuff is really cool. I've done a lot with that in Canva, and I think there's definitely a long way to go there if they want to really compete with like Adobe After Effects and maybe some of these like crazy studios, even in a simple way. So I think that's a really good move for them. This is what they said specifically about this. They said, by bringing Cavalry alongside, Affinity were closing that motion editing gap and unlocking a competitive professional suite spanning photo, vector, layout, and now motion editing. Together, these tools form the foundation of a full stack creative operating system for professional work while preserving the depth and control

9:11of professional creatives or that professional creatives rely on whatever. Okay, so I mean, basically you can see their strategy here is they didn't really have motion graphics locked in and dialed in as a product. So they're going in acquiring this company, and I think it might be one of the last pieces to Canva. But the thing that's cool about this to me is because like we talked about at the beginning of the episode, Canva is so directly and closely tied into chat GPT. What does that mean? Pulling a company like this into Canva means that pretty soon you're going to actually be able to use chat GPT to create motion graphic editing. Which, come on guys, that is like arguably way cooler than saying, okay, Canva make me a business card and chat GPT use Canva to make me a business card and then it kind of like generates some sort of like basic business card. It's like, okay, chat GPT use Canva to make a motion graphic of this my logo I've uploaded with like flying things in the background that has the text moving like this. Like that is so, that'll be so freaking cool. I'm excited for that. And then my final point is why would you do this versus just telling chat GPT to like,

10:12hey, make me a business card for example. The beauty of the Canva obviously, I recently had a, what was it like a landscaper? Or no, no, no, it was a, it was a plumber. A plumber that came and fixed a broken, a leaking toilet on the second floor of a renter's house, the house that I rent out. And unfortunately, the toilet on the second story leaked, filled, flooded this roof, had to cut a hole in it, fix it, it was a nightmare. And it was funny because after the plumber sent me his business card from helping with that, the business card I could tell was obviously generated by chat GPT just because chat GPT kind of has that one font that they use by default if you don't tell it to switch the font and so, and also kind of like, like a brown kind of color scheme. So I knew like it was chat GPT generated. But what was funny is when I looked at like the fine print, I think in his website, instead of saying .com, it said .com and he just hadn't like realized that and I'm like, hey, love, love your like business card. By the way, like you were gonna want to go, like tell chat GPT to fix that last letter

11:13and he's like, oh, thanks dude, I didn't even notice. Anyways, so why do you use Canva instead of just chat GPT to straight shoot things is because they sometimes will mess up on one letter of the text or one tiny little element. If it's in Canva, you could just type it out and you can actually manually edit it without yelling at chat GPT to go fix these little tweaks. So that's why you want Canva and I'm super stoked to have motion graphics built into chat GPT now. Absolutely. And then one last thing is along with the Canva growing its business, 36% due to open AI and chat GPT recommending it. That's why you need to check out our school community because we talk about how you can actually do this for your own business. Ranking in LLMs is kind of the new big thing. SEO is kind of changing a lot due to the way people are searching. So you're going to want to check that out. And thanks for listening guys and we'll see you next time. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. Game night's fun until someone spends five minutes lining up one shot. Chalk, breathe, reach shock, still aiming. While they figure it out, I fire up Champa Casino.

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