Canva has announced plans to acquire Leonardo.ai, an Australian generative AI content and research startup, as part of its goal to build a “world-class suite of visual AI tools.” While financial terms haven’t been disclosed, the deal will see Canva gain access to Leonardo.ai’s lineup of user-customizable text-to-image and text-to-video generators.
In Canva’s announcement, company co-founder Cameron Adams says Leonardo.ai will “continue to develop its web platform” as a separate product offering, much like the Affinity creative software suite Canva acquired in March. Leonardo.ai’s technology and Phoenix foundation model will also be “rapidly” integrated into Canva’s existing suite of Magic Studio products, such as the Magic Media image and video generator.
Canva has made efforts to diversify its platform with more office suite-like tools of late, but the visual design and communications platform remains one of the biggest competitors to Adobe’s lineup of creative software products. Where the Affinity acquisition may help Canva to compete against Adobe software like Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, Leonardo.ai could be similarly poised as an alternative to Adobe’s Firefly generative AI models.
Leonardo.ai told TechCrunch that its models are trained using “licensed, synthetic, and publicly available/open source data,” which is vaguer than Adobe’s training disclosure for Firefly. Despite this, Adobe suffered backlash to a recent policy update that forced it to explicitly state that user data wouldn’t be used to train the company’s generative AI models. Canva has an opportunity to position itself as a growing alternative, but it needs to tread carefully to avoid any Adobe-like scrutiny from creators who hold similar reservations about generative AI.
The acquisition of Leonardo.ai marks another significant step in Canva’s mission to enhance its AI capabilities and solidify its position as a leader in the visual design space.
