Canva has acquired Leonardo.ai, a generative AI content and research startup, as the corporate looks to expand the scope of its AI technology stack.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Cameron Adams, Canva's co-founder and chief product officer, said it was a mixture of money and stock. All 120 Leonardo.ai employees will join Canva, including the leadership team.
“Leonardo will proceed to operate independently from Canva and deal with rapid innovation, research and development, now backed by Canva's resources,” Adams told TechCrunch. “We will proceed to supply all of Leonardo's existing tools and solutions. This acquisition is designed to assist Leonardo further evolve its platform and deepen its user growth with our investment, including by expanding its API business and investing in fundamental model research and development.”
Founded in 2022, Sydney-based Leonardo.ai was originally intended to deal with creating video game assets – the startup's founders met while working at a video game company. But then the Leonardo.ai team decided to expand the platform for other scenarios, resembling creating and training AI models for image creation in industries resembling fashion, promoting and architecture.
Today, Leonardo.ai offers collaboration tools and a personal cloud for models, including video generators, in addition to access to APIs that enable customers to construct their very own technical infrastructure on Leonardo.ai's platform.
Leonardo.ai differs from other generative AI art platforms in the quantity of control it gives users, co-founders Jachin Bhasme, JJ Fiasson, and Chris Gillis told TechCrunch in an interview last December. For example, Leonardo.ai's Live Canvas feature allows users to type in a text prompt after which make a fast sketch of what the should appear to be. As the user sketches, Leonardo.ai creates a photorealistic image in real time based on text and sketch prompts.
It's unclear how Leonardo.ai trains its own generative models, including its flagship Phoenix model. Given the legal ramifications of coaching models on copyrighted content without permission, that is a very important query to ask of any generative AI service. Leonardo.ai's PR department remained vague after we asked for clarification, saying only that the models are trained on “licensed, synthetic, and publicly available/open source data.”
Canva itself is comparatively supportive of developers adopting generative AI and has committed to providing $200 million over the subsequent few years to pay developers who comply with have their content used to coach the corporate's AI models.
AI for more growth
Leonardo.ai has over 19 million registered users and over a billion images have been created using its tools.
Adams says Leonardo.ai will help develop Canvas's generative AI suite, Magic Studio. The company had raised over $38.8 million in funding prior to the acquisition from backers including Smash Capital, Blackbird, Side Stage Ventures, TIRTA Ventures, Gaorong Capital and Samsung Next.
“We can be trying to integrate Leonardo's technology into Magic Studio, which we’re very enthusiastic about,” said Adams. “This could involve making existing Magic Studio tools much more powerful, or introducing latest generative AI features based on Leonardo's models directly into Canva. It's early days and we'll be sitting all the way down to determine what that appears like, but we stay up for expanding what our users can do with AI on Canva.”
Canva has been investing in generative AI tools since December 2022, starting with copywriting assistant Magic Write. With a watch toward an IPO, the corporate has ramped up its development efforts in recent months through each internal projects and acquisitions. In February 2021, Canva acquired Kaleido, which offers a drag-and-drop service for removing the background for images and videos. Adams said Kaleido laid the groundwork for a lot of Canva's newer generative AI efforts.
Leonardo.ai is Canva's eighth acquisition overall and second this yr, three months after acquiring British design firm Affinity for an estimated $380 million. Canva also owns presentation startup Zeetings, free stock photography sites Pixabay and Pexels, and Czech product mockup app Smartmockups.
Founded in 2012, Canva has raised greater than $560 million (its most up-to-date valuation was $26 billion), has nearly $2 billion in revenue, and has over 180 million monthly users worldwide.
“It's a major but natural next step in our efforts to construct essentially the most powerful, all-encompassing visual AI offering,” said Adams. “We've put quite a lot of emphasis on developing an AI-powered workflow that features generative solutions like image and design generation. Combining this Canva workflow with latest generative capabilities will help us further differentiate our AI offering and create latest opportunities for the growing base of teams and corporations using Canva.”
