Canva Acquires Leonardo AI for $320 Million, Boosting Its Generative AI Capabilities

Canva's AI prize Leonardo traded for $320m, dividing VC industry

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Canva has bought AI image generation company Leonardo AI for more than $320 million in a move that has split the industry between those deriding it as a "saviour" purchase and others who see it as a smart defensive move. Canva, Australia's largest private technology company, announced it had bought the Sydney-based Leonardo on Tuesday at a price both sides refused to disclose. Even venture capital funds invested in Leonardo kept the price secret from their own backers.

Canva acquires Leonardo AI image startup to bolster generative offerings

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Today, creative design platform Canva announced it is acquiring Leonardo AI, a fellow Australian startup offering an advanced generative AI platform for creating images and art based on the open source Stable Diffusion AI models. While the financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed, Canva has confirmed that Leonardo's entire 120-strong workforce, including AI researchers and the executive team, will join its AI team. They will work towards integrating Leonardo's proprietary tech and "Phoenix" foundation model into Canva's suite of AI products. "This field is constantly evolving, and Leonardo's technical leadership and community impact can't be overstated. Bringing our worlds together will accelerate each of our teams' work, taking us from strength to strength, and we can't wait to get started," Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva, said in a statement. Leonardo to get the Canva push Leonardo started in 2022 with a mission to optimize the generation of video game assets. The founders, Jachin Bhasme, J.J. Fiasson and Chris Gillis, wanted a solution to address high production costs and long development cycles in game development, but they soon realized the value of the technology in other areas and expanded to categories like advertising, marketing, product design, fashion and education. The company even launched capabilities to provide users with fine-grained control, including character referencing and real-time canvas to help users direct creative generation. Within just two years of launch and subsequent updates, Leonardo made waves in the highly competitive creative AI space -- dominated by the likes of Midjourney and Adobe -- and roped in 19 million users who have cumulatively generated over a billion images. Just a month ago, the company debuted Phoenix, its first in-house foundation model with a "heightened level of prompt adherence." Now, with the acquisition announced today, Leonardo hopes to continue this work with the support and scale of Canva. First, the company will use Canva's resources, from financial resources to human expertise and licensed content, to further accelerate research and development efforts and expand the (existing and upcoming) capabilities of its platform -- which will continue to operate independently. According to the creative major, it will help Leonardo with training advanced models but "no Canva user content will be shared with the startup unless Canva users have chosen to expressly opt-in." Beyond expanding its features and models with Canva's support, Leonardo will also tap the scale Canva has to offer. The company's technology, including the Phoenix model, will be integrated with Canva's Magic Studio of AI features in the coming months. This will allow over 190 million users of the creative platform instant access to the novel technology. For Canva, integrating Leonardo's model and technology will pave the way to serve the community better, allowing creators to push the creative and strategic aspects of their work with faster and more compelling visual generations. However, as of now, the companies have not shared how exactly the capabilities and technologies will be rolled out to the users. Part of Canva's ongoing embrace of gen AI Notably, Canva has been building its AI capabilities for quite some time as part of its effort to take on the rise of new-age creative companies like Midjourney, Stability AI and Ideogram as well as already massive and continually evolving industry leader Adobe. The company launched background removal capabilities back in 2019 but the real push came when it visual AI company Kaleido⁠ and launched the first version of its Text to Image⁠ tool in 2022. This was followed by a full-fledged suite of a dozen AI tools called Magic Studio⁠. These offerings have been used over seven billion times so far. Apart from Leonardo and Kaleido⁠, Canva also acquired Affinity, Flourish, Pixels, Zeetings, Pixabay and Smartmockups. Not everyone is a fan of the acquisition or underlying tech. Ed Newton-Rex, founder and CEO of AI certification startup Fairly Trained, called upon on Canva to answer if they will retrain models from scratch off licensed data, or rely on data scraped from the web that may include copyrighted material used without express permission. Still, for Canva's users, the addition of Leonardo is likely to only further enhance the web-based creative suite and make it even more competitive with Adobe's Creative Cloud.

Canva to acquire generative AI platform Leonardo.AI

Canva and Leonardo.AI together, aims to bring users' ideas to life through production-quality images and videos Canva, a visual communication platform, announced plans to acquire Leonardo.AI. According to an official release, Canva and Leonardo.AI together, aims to bring users' ideas to life through production-quality images and videos. The acquisition is expected to complement Canva's offering and enhance the company's vision to build a world-class suite of visual AI tools. Canva acquires Leonardo.AI As AI continues to shape the future of work and visual communication, many companies are using AI to upgrade their services. In line with this, the acquisition by Canva aims to accelerate its investment in continued research and development while bringing Leonardo's model to Canva's community worldwide. So, what are the benefits that you can get from the collaboration? Here's how you can upgrade your Canva experience: In addition to this, Leonardo's technology has been used to produce more than one billion images in the last 18 months, the blog highlighted. The blog further added that Leonardo.Ai will continue to develop its web platform for its millions of users. Furthermore, Canva also aims to provide its business customers with features now accelerated with Canva's financial resources, expertise, and licensed content from their Canva Creators program. Other updates It is believed that for Leonardo.AI this is an opportunity to produce new levels of AI innovation while also growing the organization's scale. With Canva's support, the company's current trajectory is expected to get an upgrade. The collaboration of Canva and Leonardo.AI plans to build an even more creative-centric generative AI platform globally. Furthermore, Leonardo's new foundational model, Phoenix, is believed to take creator control to the next level. Now you can get an unprecedented prompt adherence, coherent, accurate text in images and the ability to generate production-ready assets in one shot. Industry reacts "This field is constantly evolving, and Leonardo's technical leadership and community impact can't be overstated. Bringing our worlds together will accelerate each of our teams' work, taking us from strength to strength, and we can't wait to get started," Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Canva, explained. "Today marks the start of a new chapter which will accelerate the pace we innovate at Leonardo.Ai," JJ Fiasson, Founder and CEO, Leonardo.AI, concluded.

Canva acquiring Leonardo.AI will boost its AI suite for consumers and businesses

In what could prove to be one of the most significant artificial intelligence (AI) acquisitions this year, Canva has completed the deal for Australian generative AI company Leonardo.AI. This will undoubtedly strengthen Canva's AI suite for consumers, small business and enterprises, as it competes on multiple fronts, including with Adobe, Microsoft and Google. The financial terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, but for Canva which now has more than 190 million users worldwide, this will add another layer of versatility to its existing tools, including Magic Media. "This field is constantly evolving, and Leonardo's technical leadership and community impact can't be overstated. Bringing our worlds together will accelerate each of our teams' work, taking us from strength to strength, and we can't wait to get started," says Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva. Also read: Exclusive | Most cutting-edge tools use AI built in-house: Canva's Cameron Adams Arriving within Canva's fold will be Leonardo.Ai's foundational model, and team of 120 researchers, engineers, and designers. Their foundation model is called Phoenix. Canva makes it clear that Leonardo.AI's brand and identity will remain untouched. "Leonardo.Ai will continue to develop its web platform for its millions of users, including its business customers," the company confirms. They will now, however, have Canva's financial resources as well as access to licensed content from the Canva Creators program. "We speak to creatives every day and we love seeing what they can do using Leonardo.Ai. The possibilities are endless, and we're excited to bring more power and control to every creator's workflow. As part of Canva, we will have the support to significantly scale the Leonardo.Ai platform, and we're excited about the pipeline of cool new features we are planning to bring to market," Leonardo.AI says, in a statement announcing the deal with Canva. Also read: Canva's smart acquisitions fuel its latest chapter of growth Canva has used its recent acquisitions smartly. For its one of its kind application suite covering a spectrum of visual communication and workplace tools, adding Leonardo.AI which was founded in 2022 follows on a trend from recent years, with the UK-based Serif's Affinity being another standout example. In Affinity's instance, they were able to tap the "pro" tools appreciated by a demographic of users- Affinity's focus areas are professional photo editing, illustration, graphic design and page layout. At Canva Create 2024 this summer, Affinity released v2.5, which includes new advanced editing options that further pushes the capabilities envelope for 'pro' editing performance. The upgrades also bring Variable Font support which opens a new world of typographic design choices for designers, and an addition of a Stroke Width Tool for an on-document way of editing the pressure profile of any curve. Also read: Canva sharpens focus on enterprises as a refreshed UI waits to be discovered For Canva, the Magic Studio which received significant updates this summer, access to the Phoenix foundation model may prove crucial. The company insists they will not waste any time in getting the integration in place. "We plan to rapidly integrate Leonardo's leading technology and their Phoenix foundational model into our existing suite of Magic Studio products, such as our AI image and video generator, Magic Media. Deeper investment into foundational model research and development will be pivotal to both Canva and Leonardo," Canva says, in a statement. Access to Leonardo's customers across businesses and enterprises, adoption which has already seen 19 million users, could help Canva make further inroads into the enterprise space. Leonardo.AI's present set of tools includes an AI art generator, an AI video generator, a transparent PNG generator for consumers. Alongside, they have AI marketing and AI graphics design tools, as well as architecture generation capabilities, interior design and printing solutions.