Canva Acquires Leonardo.ai: Revolutionizing Creative Technology with AI Integration

Canva has made its second acquisition this year by purchasing the image generation start-up Leonardo.ai, marking a strategic move into artificial intelligence to compete with Adobe Inc., a leader in creative software. The agreement, finalized in approximately a month, enables Canva to incorporate Leonardo.ai’s video and image generation technologies into its own offerings. Co-founder Cameron Adams noted that this acquisition is Canva’s fastest to date. This purchase follows closely after the acquisition of the Affinity software suite, popular among Apple Mac users, for a significant amount. Canva, valued at $26 billion this year, is among the emerging creative software developers challenging Adobe’s market dominance. Another contender, CapCut, a video-editing app owned by ByteDance, is rapidly growing its user base. With this latest acquisition, Canva welcomes the 120-person Leonardo.ai team specializing in online image generation and editing through text prompts. Founded in 2022 and supported by investor Blackbird Ventures, Leonardo.ai raised $31 million last year and has facilitated the creation of over a billion images in the last 18 months. These new services from Leonardo.ai enhance Canva’s expanding suite of AI tools, aimed at attracting Adobe’s enterprise clients and driving revenue growth. Established around ten years ago by Adams, Cliff Obrecht, and Melanie Perkins, Canva has evolved as a rival to Adobe and has recently acquired eight companies, including Affinity, Kaleido.ai, and image providers Pexels and Pixabay. Adams, also serving as Canva’s chief product officer, emphasized the versatility of generative AI in adapting and refining output, signaling a new frontier in creative technology.