Canva continues on its AI journey by acquiring Leonardo.ai
Canva have announced that they have acquired generative AI company Leonardo.Ai, as they work towards building the world’s leading design Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology.
With Leonardo.Ai’s incredible foundational model, and team of 120 high-calibre researchers, engineers, and designers, this acquisition bolsters Canva’s ability to supercharge their growing suite of AI products while investing in continued research and innovation to unlock the future of visual AI.
Much like Affinity, Leonardo.Ai will continue to develop its web platform for its millions of users – including its business customers – now accelerated with Canva’s financial resources, expertise, and licensed content from our Canva Creators program.
Canva have been investing in ways to enhance their artificial intelligence goals for a number of years, starting with the launch of their Background Remover tool in 2019, which later saw the company welcome visual AI company Kaleido to Canva in 2021. Not long after, Canva introduced the first iteration of their Text to Image tool in 2022, followed by a full suite of AI-powered products, Magic Studio, in 2023.
Since Magic Studio launched, it has been used more than 7 billion times. Canva have seen a 40% increase in monthly users this year alone leveraging their AI tools for everything from summarizing documents to creating images and turning brainstorm whiteboards into fully-fledged presentations.
With the addition of Leonardo, Canva will continue on their mission to lead innovation in the ever-evolving design and visual AI ecosystem. In a short time, the Leonardo team already has an impressive track record of innovation and excellence when it comes to AI-generated photos, graphics, and videos. Today, more than 19 million people use their products just two years after launching.
As well as using this acquisition to supercharge Leonardo’s platform and user growth, Canva also plan to rapidly integrate Leonardo’s leading technology and their Phoenix foundational model into Canva’s existing suite of Magic Studio products, such as their AI image and video generator: Magic Media. Deeper investment into foundational model research and development will be pivotal to both Canva and Leonardo, and Canva are enthusiastic to be also investing in supporting Leonardo’s B2B adoption.
From beginners to professionals, Leonardo’s intuitive capabilities fuse simplicity and power to produce incredible results. Its models can generate stunning images in styles ranging from hyper-realistic photos to character portraits, anime, painterly styles, and more. Its AI video generation tool brings almost any concept to dynamic life, from animated illustrations to storytelling sequences. Leveraging a slew of cutting-edge features, Leonardo excels in model fine-tuning, accurate prompt interpretation, training speed, inference pace, and multi-image prompting capabilities.
The partnership between Canva and Leonardo.Ai is set to unlock new levels of creativity and design in the generative AI space.
