As part of its goal to build a “world-class suite of visual AI tools”, Canva has announced that it will acquire Leonardo.ai, an Australian generative AI content and research startup. The deal will allow Canva to access Leonardo’s customisable text-to-image and text-to-video generators. Financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed at the time of writing.
Leonardo will continue operating as a separate entity, with Canva co-founder Cameron Adams saying that the startup will “continue to develop its web platform” for its more than 19 million registered users and business customers. It’ll also be armed with “Canva’s financial resources, expertise, and licensed content from our Canva Creators program.” The acquisition seems to repeat Affinity, which continues to work as a separate entity, although powering some Canva features.
Canva has been working hard to build a complete online image editing suite for a while now, possibly to compete with Adobe. The Affinity acquisition allowed the web-based editing tool to create alternatives for Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. Similarly, Leonardo could fill in the gap by providing Canva with a competitor for Adobe’s Firefly generative AI models and the features they offer.
This still leaves Canva open to navigating the minefield known as content licensing for training AI models. While Leonardo’s offerings may allow Canva to compete with Adobe Firefly models, Adobe has also had flak from creatives on the internet for the training data used to train Firefly models. According to TechCrunch, Lenoardo’s models are trained using “licensed, synthetic, and publicly available/open source data,” a description vaguer than Adobe’s training data disclosure for Firefly.
Canva has been supportive of creatives adopting generative AI, even committing $200 million over the next few years as compensation to creators who allow their content to be used to train Canva’s AI models. However, the uncertainty surrounding how Leonardo trains its AI models can ruin the goodwill Canva has been working on unless the company is careful about what comes next.
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