Canva to Acquire Generative AI Platform Leonardo.AI to Bring Leading Visual AI to Every Organization

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Published Jul 29, 2024 • 4 minute read

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Company continues to accelerate investment and pace of development with Canva AI products now used more than 7 billion times

SYDNEY — Canva, a world leader in visual communication with more than 190 million monthly active users, today announced plans to acquire Leonardo.AI. As one of Australia’s fastest-growing startups, and a leading generative AI content and research company, Leonardo.AI is empowering millions of people to bring their ideas to life through production-quality images and videos. The acquisition complements Canva’s offering and enhances the company’s vision to build a world-class suite of visual AI tools, marking this as an important milestone in its AI journey.

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As AI continues to shape the future of work and visual communication, the acquisition will accelerate Canva’s investment in continued research and development while bringing Leonardo’s cutting-edge foundational model to Canva’s community worldwide. From creating assets for marketing and advertising campaigns, to visualizing stunning interior concepts, refining mockups, and producing dynamic videos, Leonardo’s technology has been used to produce more than one billion images in the last 18 months.

For Leonardo.AI this is an opportunity to produce new levels of AI innovation while also growing the organisation’s scale. With Canva’s support, the company’s current trajectory will be supercharged to build an even more creative-centric generative AI platform globally.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Leonardo.AI to Canva – two Australian companies joining forces to bring world-first breakthroughs in AI and creativity,” said Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva. “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.”

World Leading Generative AI Capabilities

Founded in late 2022, Leonardo’s foundational model empowers millions of people to turn ideas into production-quality visual assets with unprecedented control, speed and style consistency. Creators can generate images in any chosen aesthetic in seconds with simple prompts, create videos, sketch with AI, and custom-train models with their own datasets.

Leonardo’s new foundational model, Phoenix, takes creator control to the next level, with unprecedented prompt adherence, coherent, accurate text in images and the ability to generate production-ready assets in one shot.

“Today marks the start of a new chapter which will accelerate the pace we innovate at Leonardo.Ai,” said JJ Fiasson, Founder and CEO, Leonardo.AI. Joining the Canva family means we can invest more deeply in scaling our AI research efforts globally, and move even faster to deliver new features and functionality to creatives worldwide.”

In less than two years since launching, Leonardo.AI has amassed more than 19 million registered users and is used across a wide variety of industries including advertising, marketing, design, entertainment, architecture, fashion, e-commerce and education. The joint effort with Canva will produce new levels of AI technology to not only engage, but to also grow Leonardo’s fast growing user base.

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From hobbyists to film directors, architects, and professional designers, Leonardo’s technology delivers advanced creative control that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in generative AI, while remaining intuitive and accessible. Its models can generate stunning images in styles ranging from strikingly realistic photos to character portraits, anime, painterly styles, and more, while its AI video generation tools can bring almost any concept to dynamic life.

Reimagining Visual Communication

Canva’s recent Visual Economy Report shows that the need for effective, efficient, and compelling visual communication has surged dramatically. AI is now playing an increasingly important role in elevating both productivity and creativity at work. From marketing teams scaling global campaigns by instantly generating ad creative for specific audiences, to designers creating initial drafts and storyboards, generative artificial intelligence is changing the way work gets done.

Leonardo’s world-class technology and foundational model will supercharge Canva’s mission to empower every kind of professional to turn their ideas into designs in an instant, leading to faster, more innovative, and more compelling visual communication.

Leonardo’s technology will complement Canva’s Magic Studio, the company’s suite of AI tools, which has been used more than 7 billion times since it launched in 2023. To date, Canva users have elevated their design and creative output leveraging Magic Studio for everything from summarising documents to creating images and turning brainstorm whiteboards into fully-fledged presentations.

Supercharging Canva’s AI Journey

Canva will continue to invest in Leonardo’s standalone platform while integrating its technology throughout the company’s suite of Magic Studio products. Working with Leonardo’s team of 120 high-caliber researchers, engineers, and designers will also bolster Canva’s research and development capabilities as the company continues to invest in long-term innovation opportunities.

Acquisitions have played an important role in elevating and accelerating Canva’s technology over the last decade. The acquisition of Leonardo is the company’s 8th acquisition, joining Affinity (2024), Flourish (2022), Kaleido (2021), Smartmockups (2021), Pexels (2019), Pixabay (2019) and Zeetings (2018).

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For more details about the acquisition, see Canva Co-Founder Cameron Adams blog post and Leonardo.Ai’s CEO JJ Fiasson’s blog post, respectively.

About Canva

Launched in 2013, Canva is a free online visual communications and collaboration platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates ranging from presentations, documents, websites, social media graphics, posters, apparel to videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage, and audio clips, anyone can take an idea and create something beautiful.

About Leonardo.Ai

Leonardo.Ai is one of Australia’s fastest-growing startups, democratising creativity with its generative AI content production platform. Since launching in 2022, the company has amassed more than 19 million users worldwide, who have generated over one billion images. Leonardo.Ai is currently being used by both hobbyists and professionals across creative industries such as advertising and marketing, design and architecture, film, fashion, photography, e-commerce, education, and more.

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