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The company continues to accelerate the pace of investment and development, and Canva AI products have now been used more than 7 billion times
Canva, the world's leading visual communications company with more than 190 million monthly active users, today announced plans to acquire Leonardo.AI. Leonardo.AI is one of the fastest-growing startups in Australia and a leading generative AI content and research company that helps millions of people bring their ideas to life by producing production-quality images and videos. The acquisition complements Canva's offerings and strengthens the company's vision to build a world-class suite of visual AI tools, marking a significant milestone in its AI journey.
Canva to acquire Leonardo.AI, a leading generative AI content and research company (Graphic: United States Business Wire)
Canva co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht with Leonardo.AI co-founder JJ Fiasson (Photo: United States Business Wire)
Image generated with Leonardo.AI (Graphic: United States Business Wire)
Image generated with Leonardo.AI (Graphic: United States Business Wire)
Image generation tools for Leonardo.AI (Graphic: United States Business Wire)
As AI continues to shape the future of work and visual communication, this acquisition will accelerate Canva's investment in ongoing R&D while bringing Leonardo's cutting-edge foundational model to Canva's global community. From creating assets for marketing and advertising campaigns, to visualizing stunning interior design concepts, refining mockups, and producing dynamic videos, Leonardo's technology has been used to produce more than 1 billion images in the last 18 months.
For Leonardo.AI, this is an opportunity to take AI innovation to the next level while also scaling the organization. With Canva's support, the company's current trajectory will be further boosted to build a more creative-centric generative AI platform on a global scale.
Cameron Adams, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva, said, "We are thrilled to welcome Leonardo.AI to Canva – two Australia companies will join forces to bring world-first breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and creativity. The field is constantly evolving, and Leonardo's technical leadership and community impact cannot be overstated. Joining forces will accelerate the work of each of our teams, making us stronger and we can't wait to get to work." ”
World-leading AI-generating capabilities
Founded in late 2022, Leonardo's foundational model empowers millions of people to transform ideas into production-quality visual assets with unprecedented control, speed, and stylistic consistency. With a simple prompt, creators can generate images of any chosen aesthetic style, create videos, sketch with artificial intelligence, and customize training models with their own datasets in seconds.
Leonardo's new base model, Phoenix, takes creators to a new level of control, with unprecedented prompt compliance, coherent and accurate image text, and the ability to generate production-ready assets the first time.
JJ Fiasson, Leonardo.AI Founder and CEO, said: "Today marks the beginning of a new chapter that will accelerate the pace of innovation in our Leonardo.Ai. Joining the Canva family means we can invest more deeply in scaling AI research efforts on a global scale and deliver new features and functionality to creatives around the world at an even faster pace. ”
Since its launch, Leonardo.AI has amassed more than 19 million registered users in less than two years and is widely used in a variety of industries such as advertising, marketing, design, entertainment, architecture, fashion, e-commerce, and education. By working together with Canva, Leonardo.AI's AI technology will reach a new level that will not only engage users, but also expand Leonardo's fast-growing user base.
From amateurs to film directors, architects, and professional designers, Leonardo's technology provides advanced creative control that pushes the boundaries of generative AI technology while remaining intuitive and easy to use. Its models can generate stunning images in a variety of styles, from photorealistic photos to portraits, anime, painting styles, and more, while its AI video generation tools can give dynamic life to almost any concept.
Reimagining visual communication
Canva's recent Visual Economy report shows that the demand for effective, efficient, and compelling visual communication has increased dramatically. Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in improving productivity and creativity at work. From marketing teams scaling global campaigns by instantly generating ad creatives for specific audiences, to designers creating first drafts and storyboards, generative AI is changing the way people work.
Leonardo's world-class technology and foundational models will power Canva's mission to enable professionals of all types to turn ideas into designs in an instant, resulting in faster, more innovative, and more compelling visual communications.
Leonardo's technology will complement Canva's AI toolkit, Magic Studio, which has been used more than 7 billion times since its launch in 2023. To date, Canva users have elevated their design and creative output with Magic Studio, doing everything from summarizing documents to creating images to turning a brainstorming whiteboard into a full presentation.
Add momentum to Canva's AI journey
Canva will continue to invest in Leonardo's standalone platform while fully integrating its technology into the company's Magic Studio product suite. As the company continues to invest in long-term innovation opportunities, working with Leonardo's team of 120 highly qualified researchers, engineers, and designers will also enhance Canva's R&D capabilities.
Over the past decade, acquisitions have played an important role in elevating and accelerating Canva's technology. The acquisition of Leonardo is the Company's eighth acquisition, following Affinity (2024), Flourish (2022), Kaleido (2021), Smartmockups (2021), Pexels (2019), Pixabay (2019) and Zeetings (2018).
For more details on the acquisition, check out Canva co-founder Cameron Adams' blog post and Leonardo.Ai CEO JJ Fiasson's blog post.
About Canva:
Launched in 2013, Canva is a free online visual communication and collaboration platform with a mission to make design accessible to everyone in the world. With a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a wealth of templates, including presentations, documents, websites, social media graphics, posters, décor, and videos, as well as a huge library of fonts, stock photos, illustrations, video clips, and audio clips, anyone can create beautiful work from their ideas.
About Leonardo.Ai
Leonardo.Ai is one of the fastest-growing startups in Australia, democratizing creativity through its generative AI content production platform. Since its inception in 2022, the company has amassed more than 19 million users worldwide, who have generated more than 1 billion images. Leonardo.Ai is currently widely used by enthusiasts and professionals in creative industries such as advertising and marketing, design and architecture, film, fashion, photography, e-commerce, education, and more.