‘We’re flattered’: AI start-up welcomes Canva comparison

The co-founders of enigmatic Sydney-based generative AI start-up Leonardo.Ai have welcomed comparisons to start-up superstar Canva, laying out ambitions in their first Australian media interview to grow into a billion-dollar business.

Leonardo.Ai’s generative AI software rivals the likes of Midjourney and ChatGPT. With more than 700 million images now generated on its platform, the start-up quickly cemented its place at the centre of what is the frothiest – and potentially most impactful – technological trend of the decade.

“Early last year we started seeing these applications for generative AI popping up … and it was just mind-blowing,” Leonardo.Ai co-founder and chief operating officer Jachin Bhasme said in an interview.

An image created with Leonardo.Ai.

“We started thinking about, ‘Hey, how can we turn this into a business and think about it from a lens of building something for professionals, what would that look like?’ ”

“What we realised early on was that the novelty with interacting with AI as a blackbox would wear thin pretty quickly, especially for professionals, and there’ll be a real desire for more control.”

Leonardo.ai co-founder and chief operating officer Jachin Bhasme.

Assembling a team of six co-founders – an abnormally large number for a technology start-up, or really any company – they built the first iteration of Leonardo and launched it on Christmas Eve 2022. The initial idea was for a generative AI platform in which game studios can train models using their own IP, and then build creative assets that match their existing styles.

“Then people started to realise the versatility of the platform and how it can be used for all sorts of use cases … It’s just exploded,” Bhasme said.

“We think about a musician picking up an instrument for the first time. Initially, you’re playing some basic chords or a melody that sounds familiar. But once you become really adept to the instrument, you start to play your own music and symphonies … And we really wanted to empower creators to go through that similar process with AI.”

Leonardo.Ai has also built up one of the largest generative AI communities globally, and has the third-most popular Discord channel, with more than 1.8 million members. Its platform allows users to easily generate ideas and hyperrealistic images ranging from environments to portraits suitable for videos, games, and websites across different industries.

Leonardo.ai chief technology officer and co-founder Peter Runham.

“The range of use cases and verticals are super diverse; we’re talking from marketing and advertising to interesting ones like fashion and architecture … It’s been really awesome to see,” Bhasme said.

Among investors, the start-up has drawn comparisons to graphic design platform Canva, which has grown from an initial team of two into a company that has a headcount of more than 3500 and a valuation rivalling that of Telstra and Qantas. Leonardo.Ai’s co-founders declined to comment on their investors or current valuation. Blackbird Ventures is reported to have bought up 20 per cent of the company.

“It is extremely flattering,” Bhasme said of the Canva comparisons. “We have high hopes for the company, and we are doing as much as we can to take this thing to the next level.”

The Australian Financial Review cited confidential documents when it reported Leonardo is on track to make $US5 million ($7.9 million) over a year, numbers on which the start-up’s co-founders declined to comment.

While the still-nascent AI sector has been plagued by power struggles – just look at the drama unfolding at ChatGPT maker OpenAI – a greater challenge seems to be questions around safety and preventing misuse.

Bhasme said that concerns around ethics and safety are “very much front of mind” for the start-up, and methods for prevention and detection of egregious content have been put in place.

The start-up has built out its platform using technology from tech giant Amazon Web Services. Its previous cloud provider was unable to handle the traffic and executives were forced to introduce a waitlist to cap its organic growth, then deciding to move all of its data to AWS.

“Early on, we evaluated many different platforms, and we try to use a bunch of them and some of them even in production,” Leonardo’s chief technology officer and co-founder Peter Runham said. “Most of our engineers are familiar with AWS, so that has helped accelerate development, but also their services offer more scale than a lot of their competitors.”

Bratin Saha, vice president of AI and machine learning for Amazon Web Services, in an interview compared the advent of generative AI with the early days of cloud computing.

“There is a massive opportunity for generative AI companies like Leonardo.Ai,” he said. “If it’s anything like the first days of the cloud, we’re going to see some really interesting and successful businesses that are built on AWS. We’re excited to continue supporting the start-up’s growth globally and help push the capabilities of generative AI to drive a new period of creativity and expressive imagination.

“We’re only three steps into a 100-kilometer marathon.”