“Wow, that’s some really sharp After Effects work,” I thought last year, when my wife showed me some animation her Airbnb colleague had created. But nope—the work came straight out of Canva.

Not content to chill with their surprisingly capable foundation, Canva is continuing to build out the “Creative Operating System” and has announced the acquisition of up-and-coming 2D animation tool Cavalry:

In their blog post they seem pretty adamant that the acquisition won’t result in dumbing down the core app:

Built for professional motion designers

Cavalry earned its place in the motion design world by doing something different. Its procedural, systems-based approach prioritises flexibility, repeatability, and performance. It wasn’t built as a simplified alternative; it was built specifically for professional motion designers and the complex workflows they rely on. That professional focus remains central.

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. Professional motion design demands precision, flexibility, and tools that can scale across complex projects.

Much as with their acquisition of Affinity, however, I’d fully expect Canva to integrate underlying tech into the core design platform, radically simplifying the interface to it—including by providing agentic and chat-based touchpoints.

As with the myriad node-based systems that sprung up last year, I wouldn’t expect most people to ever see or touch the underlying data structures. Rather, what’s essential is that the main tool can understand & modify them, so that it can deliver brilliant results at scale. That necessitates a very approachable, and totally complementary, UX.

I’m excited to see what’s next!