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Canva acquires a leading generative artificial intelligence (AI) content and research company, Leonardo.AI, in a move to bolster its position in the landscape of visual communication tools.
For an undisclosed sum, the acquisition marks a significant step for the company’s commitment to empowering users with capabilities for enhancing visual communication materials in commerce and education.
Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, expressed enthusiasm during a press conference, saying, “We’re thrilled to welcome Leonardo.AI to Canva—two Australian companies joining forces to bring world-first breakthroughs in AI and creativity.”
Leonardo.AI, founded in late 2022, is an AI platform and startup known for offering customizable text-to-image and video generation services. Leonardo has grown by itself using its state-of-the-art foundational model, Phoenix, empowering over 19 million users by turning their ideas into quality outputs. The model boasts next-level prompt adherence, accuracy, and creator control over the images they produce, whether through text prompts or simple sketches.
“Joining the Canva family means we can invest more deeply in scaling out AI research efforts globally and move even faster to deliver new features and functionality to creatives worldwide,” said JJ Fiasson, founder and CEO of Leonardo.
On Competition and Learning from Adobe
Leonardo’s strong presence in various industries will solidify Canva’s broader goal of competing with major players like Adobe Creative Cloud.
Purchasing Affinity was already a big move for Canva to rival Adobe’s publishing tools, such as Illustrator and InDesign. Phoenix may be Canva’s response to Adobe’s recent endeavors with its Firefly model.
Aside from the potential of this acquisition, Canva is bound to get a lot of scrutiny as Leonardo remains vague about where their models get their training data.
Leonardo informed TechCrunch that their models are trained with “licensed, synthetic, and publicly available/open-source data.” Canva has to tread carefully in their next steps in order to avoid the same backlash that forced Adobe to disclose their training data sources.
Integration and Innovation
Adams said the company will focus on integrating generative AI into their current workflow in ways that set them apart and empower a base of teams and enterprises using Canva.
Canva plans to integrate Leonardo’s technology into its existing suite of Magic Studio products, such as its AI image and video generator, Magic Media. Magic Studio has reportedly been used more than 7 billion times since its launch, and Canva has seen a 40% increase in its monthly users this year alone.
“We’ll look to integrate Leonardo’s technology into Magic Studio, which we’re very excited about,” Adams stated. “It’s early days, and we’ll be coming together right away to determine how this looks, but we’re excited to expand what our users are able to do with AI on Canva.”
Adams stated the purchase is nothing but a “natural next step” in their efforts to create the ultimate visual AI offering.
This marks Canva’s eighth acquisition, following its purchase of Affinity earlier this year for an estimated $380 million. While the financial terms of the deal weren’t publicly disclosed, Adams briefly mentioned it being a mix of cash and stock.
Adams noted that Leonardo.AI will continue to operate individually, now with the help of their resources and finances. Leonardo’s team of researchers, engineers, and designers will work with Canva to further develop the platform’s capabilities and future.
