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Immediately, inventive design platform Canva introduced it’s buying Leonardo AI, a fellow Australian startup providing a sophisticated generative AI platform for creating photographs and artwork based mostly on the open supply Secure Diffusion AI fashions.
Whereas the monetary phrases of the deal stay undisclosed, Canva has confirmed that Leonardo’s total 120-strong workforce, together with AI researchers and the chief group, will be a part of its AI group.
They’ll work in direction of integrating Leonardo’s proprietary tech and “Phoenix” basis mannequin into Canva’s suite of AI merchandise.
“This field is constantly evolving, and Leonardo’s technical leadership and community impact can’t be overstated. Bringing our worlds together will accelerate each of our teams’ work, taking us from strength to strength, and we can’t wait to get started,” Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva, stated in an announcement.
Leonardo to get the Canva push
Leonardo began in 2022 with a mission to optimize the era of online game belongings. The founders, Jachin Bhasme, J.J. Fiasson and Chris Gillis, needed an answer to handle excessive manufacturing prices and lengthy improvement cycles in sport improvement, however they quickly realized the worth of the know-how in different areas and expanded to classes like promoting, advertising, product design, style and training.
The corporate even launched capabilities to offer customers with fine-grained management, together with character referencing and real-time canvas to assist customers direct inventive era.
Inside simply two years of launch and subsequent updates, Leonardo made waves within the extremely aggressive inventive AI house — dominated by the likes of Midjourney and Adobe — and roped in 19 million customers who’ve cumulatively generated over a billion photographs.
Only a month in the past, the corporate debuted Phoenix, its first in-house basis mannequin with a “heightened level of prompt adherence.”
Now, with the acquisition introduced right this moment, Leonardo hopes to proceed this work with the help and scale of Canva.
First, the corporate will use Canva’s assets, from monetary assets to human experience and licensed content material, to additional speed up analysis and improvement efforts and develop the (present and upcoming) capabilities of its platform — which can proceed to function independently.
In keeping with the inventive main, it should assist Leonardo with coaching superior fashions however “no Canva user content will be shared with the startup unless Canva users have chosen to expressly opt-in.”
Tapping into Canva’s large scale
However that’s only one a part of the deliberate work.
Past increasing its options and fashions with Canva’s help, Leonardo can even faucet the size Canva has to supply.
The corporate’s know-how, together with the Phoenix mannequin, can be built-in with Canva’s Magic Studio of AI options within the coming months. This may permit over 190 million customers of the inventive platform instantaneous entry to the novel know-how.
For Canva, integrating Leonardo’s mannequin and know-how will pave the best way to serve the group higher, permitting creators to push the inventive and strategic elements of their work with quicker and extra compelling visible generations.
Nevertheless, as of now, the businesses haven’t shared how precisely the capabilities and applied sciences can be rolled out to the customers.
A part of Canva’s ongoing embrace of gen AI
Notably, Canva has been constructing its AI capabilities for fairly a while as a part of its effort to tackle the rise of new-age inventive corporations like Midjourney, Stability AI and Ideogram in addition to already large and regularly evolving {industry} chief Adobe.
The corporate launched background removing capabilities again in 2019 however the true push got here when it visible AI firm Kaleido and launched the primary model of its Textual content to Picture software in 2022. This was adopted by a full-fledged suite of a dozen AI instruments known as Magic Studio. These choices have been used over seven billion occasions up to now.
Other than Leonardo and Kaleido, Canva additionally acquired Affinity, Flourish, Pixels, Zeetings, Pixabay and Smartmockups.
Not everyone seems to be a fan of the acquisition or underlying tech. Ed Newton-Rex, founder and CEO of AI certification startup Pretty Skilled, known as upon on Canva to reply if they are going to retrain fashions from scratch off licensed information, or depend on information scraped from the online that will embody copyrighted materials used with out categorical permission.
Nonetheless, for Canva’s customers, the addition of Leonardo is prone to solely additional improve the web-based inventive suite and make it much more aggressive with Adobe’s Artistic Cloud.