Canva has announced plans to acquire Leonardo.ai. It is an Australian startup specializing in AI enablement and analytics with the aim of creating “global visual AI tools”. Although financial details were not disclosed, the purchase of Leonardo.ai’s will provide central access to Canva. They customizable text-to-image and text-to-video generator that has gained popularity in a short time.
According to Canva co-founder Cameron Adams, Leonardo.ai will continue developing its web platform as a separate product. Canva, which acquired the Affinity creative software suite in March, will rapidly integrate Leonardo.ai’s technology and the Phoenix foundation model. Quick resources about Canva’s Magic Studio include Magic Media image and video generators.
Canva is diversifying its platform with tools similar to office suites, but it’s a big competitor to Adobe’s creative software. The acquired Affinity aims to challenge Adobe software such as Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. Meanwhile Leonardo.ai could act as an alternative to the Adobe Firefly generative AI model
Leonardo.ai informed TechCrunch that its model is trained with “licensed, synthetic, publicly available/open source data”. This explanation isn’t as specific as Adobe’s training release for Firefly, which faced a backlash over a policy update that made it clear that Canva has a chance to position itself as a strong alternative to not capturing user data not used for training and generative AI models .