Design application Canva has revealed plans to acquire Leonardo AI, an innovative image generator and AI creative platform. This strategic move aims to integrate Leonardo's cutting-edge technology into Canva’s platform, significantly enhancing its AI capabilities.
Canva plans to incorporate Leonardo’s Phoenix foundational model into its AI image and video generator, Magic Media. Despite the acquisition, Leonardo will continue to operate independently, maintaining and building on its existing products. Importantly, no Canva user content will be shared with Leonardo unless users opt in.
Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer at Canva, expressed excitement about the partnership, stating, “The partnership between Canva and Leonardo AI is set to unlock new levels of creativity and design in the generative AI space. We’ll be sharing more soon, so stay tuned!”
Canva, a leading online design tool, boasts over 170 million global users. Over the past year, the platform has integrated AI tools to enable users to create images and visuals for their content. Notably, Canva was one of the first plugins available for ChatGPT, allowing users to generate images directly within the chatbot.
Leonardo AI, an Australian startup, has developed foundation models capable of generating high-quality images and videos from text inputs. Its Phoenix model stands out for its speed and accuracy, outperforming rivals like Stable Diffusion. Phoenix excels at generating images that closely match detailed text instructions and can produce clear and accurate text within images, a challenging feat for many existing models.
The integration of Phoenix into Canva products and services will allow users to generate new images, thereby enhancing their content creation process. Before its acquisition, Leonardo had raised approximately $40 million in funding from investors including Smash Capital, Side Stage Ventures, and Blackbird Ventures.
“With Canva’s backing, we will be able to supercharge the Leonardo AI platform and accelerate our pace of innovation,” Leonardo AI stated in a press announcement. “We will be scaling up our research capability in a big way, expanding our global research team to enable them to work across many modalities and tackle more problems at speed.”
This acquisition marks Canva's second major purchase this year, following its acquisition of the creative design platform Affinity in March. The acquisition of Leonardo AI underscores Canva's commitment to enhancing its AI capabilities and maintaining its position as a leading design platform.
