Canva Acquires Generative AI Platform Leonardo, Continuing its Expansion
The web-based design platform Canva, a competitor to Adobe, has announced it is buying generative AI company Leonardo.
Canva has been beefing up its offerings in recent times with March’s acquisition of Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher putting it in the photo editing space.
Leonardo has user-customizable AI image generators and AI video generators as well as offering AI photo tools such as upscalers and a PNG generator.
Company co-founder Cameron Adams says Leonardo AI will “continue to develop its web platform” as a separate product offering, the same deal as Affinity.
The Verge reports that Leonardo AI’s technology and Phoenix foundation model will be “rapidly” integrated into Canva’s existing suite of Magic Studio products, such as the Magic Media image and video generator. All employees, including exectuives, are moving over to Canva.
“We’re incredibly excited to welcome generative AI company Leonardo.Ai to the Canva family, as we work towards building the world’s leading design AI technology,” Canva says in a press release.
“With Leonardo.Ai’s incredible foundational model, and team of 120 high-caliber researchers, engineers, and designers, this acquisition bolsters our ability to supercharge our growing suite of AI products while investing in continued research and innovation to unlock the future of visual AI.”
Leonardo AI is a generative AI platform and when asked by TechCrunch what training data the company uses a spokesperson gave a vague response saying the models are trained on “licensed, synthetic and publicly available/open source data.”
Adobe in the Crosshairs
Canva CEO Melanie Perkins has explicitly stated that the design world needs more alternatives to Adobe, which is part of the reason why her company purchased Serif Affinity and continues to add apps.
“In the design market, there hasn’t been a strong challenger for a long time. It has been a little bit of a one-horse race, and I don’t think that works out well for anyone or certainly not well for the consumers or the designers specifically,” she said on The Verge podcast. “I think that being able to have another alternative in the market for professional designers benefits everyone.”
The financial details of Canva’s acquisition of Leonardo are yet to be disclosed.
