recently,Canva Announced the acquisition of Generating AI Art Content and ResearchStartups Leonardo.ai, further increasing its investment in AI technology. The exact amount of the deal wasn't disclosed, but Cameron Adams, Canva's co-founder and chief product officer, said the acquisition is in the form of a combination of cash and stock. It's worth noting that Leonardo.ai's 120 employees, including its executive team, will be joining Canva.
In an interview, Adams said Leonardo.ai will continue to operate independently, focusing on rapid innovation, research and development, and utilizing Canva's resources to advance these goals. He also emphasized that all of Leonardo.ai's existing tools and solutions will continue to be available. The goal of this acquisition is to help Leonardo.ai evolve its platform while driving user growth through Canva's investments, including expanding its API business and investing more in fundamental model development.
Leonardo.ai was founded in 2022 and initially focused on the creation of video game assets. As the team continued to explore, they decided to expand the platform's capabilities to meet a wider range of needs, such as creating and training AI models for industries such as fashion, advertising, and architecture. Currently, Leonardo.ai not only offers a private cloud service for collaboration tools and models, but also allows customers to build their own technology infrastructure based on their platform.
What sets Leonardo.ai apart from other platforms for generating AI art is the higher level of control that the user enjoys; Leonardo.ai's "real-time canvas" feature allows the user to enter text prompts and then make quick sketches, and the AI generates photorealistic images in real time based on the text and sketches.
Canva has been supportive of creators adopting generative AI and has committed $200 million over the next few years to pay creators who agree to use their content for AI model training.Currently, Leonardo.ai has more than 19 million registered users and has created more than one billion images.
Leonardo.ai will contribute to Canva's Magic Studio generative AI suite, Adams said. They plan to integrate Leonardo's technology into Magic Studio, potentially augmenting the capabilities of existing tools or introducing new generative AI features directly into Canva.
Canva has been investing in the development of generative AI tools since December 2022 and has dramatically ramped up the pace of development over the past few months through both internal projects and acquisitions. Leonardo.ai is Canva's eighth acquisition and second this year, shortly after Canva acquired Affinity, a UK-based design firm, for approximately $380 million.