Welcome to Canva, Leonardo!

Since launching Canva in 2013, we've been working towards our mission of empowering everyone to design. As visual communication becomes essential in teams and workplaces across the globe, we’re proud to be supporting more than 190 million people to bring their ideas to life. However, with such an ambitious mission, we often say we're only 1% of the way there – and there are always new horizons.

Today, we’re incredibly excited to welcome generative AI company Leonardo.Ai⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to the Canva family, as we work towards building the world’s leading design AI technology. With Leonardo.Ai’s incredible foundational model, and team of 120 high-caliber researchers, engineers, and designers, this acquisition bolsters our ability to supercharge our growing suite of AI products while investing in continued research and innovation to unlock the future of visual AI.

Much like Affinity⁠(opens in a new tab or window), Leonardo.Ai will continue to develop its web platform for its millions of users – including its business customers – now accelerated with Canva’s financial resources, expertise, and licensed content from our Canva Creators program.

Continuing our AI journey

We’ve been investing in ways to enhance our artificial intelligence goals for a number of years, starting with the launch of our Background Remover tool in 2019, which later saw us welcome visual AI company Kaleido⁠(opens in a new tab or window) to Canva in 2021. Not long after, we introduced the first iteration of our Text to Image⁠(opens in a new tab or window) tool in 2022, followed by our full suite of AI-powered products, Magic Studio⁠(opens in a new tab or window), in 2023.

Since Magic Studio launched, it has been used more than 7 billion times. We’ve seen a 40% increase in monthly users this year alone leveraging our AI tools for everything from summarizing documents to creating images and turning brainstorm whiteboards into fully-fledged presentations.

With the addition of Leonardo, we’ll continue on our mission to lead innovation in the ever-evolving design and visual AI ecosystem. In a short time, the Leonardo team already has an impressive track record of innovation and excellence when it comes to AI-generated photos, graphics, and videos. Today, more than 19 million people use their products just two years after launching.

As well as using this acquisition to supercharge Leonardo’s platform and user growth, we also plan to rapidly integrate Leonardo’s leading technology and their Phoenix foundational model into our existing suite of Magic Studio products, such as our AI image and video generator: Magic Media⁠(opens in a new tab or window). Deeper investment into foundational model research and development will be pivotal to both Canva and Leonardo, and we’re enthusiastic to be also investing in supporting Leonardo’s B2B adoption.

World-leading AI technology

From beginners to professionals, Leonardo’s intuitive capabilities fuse simplicity and power to produce incredible results. Its models can generate stunning images in styles ranging from

hyper-realistic photos to character portraits, anime, painterly styles, and more. Its AI video generation tool brings almost any concept to dynamic life, from animated illustrations to storytelling sequences. Leveraging a slew of cutting-edge features, Leonardo excels in model fine-tuning, accurate prompt interpretation, training speed, inference pace, and multi-image prompting capabilities.

AI in visual communication

Canva’s recent Visual Economy Report⁠(opens in a new tab or window) shows that the need for effective, efficient, and compelling visual communication has surged dramatically, while our Marketing & AI Report⁠(opens in a new tab or window) shows AI is playing an increasingly important role in elevating productivity and creativity at work.

For example, Marketing teams can leverage generative AI to scale global campaigns by instantly generating ad creative tailored to specific audiences. Designers can create initial drafts of visuals, enabling them to jump straight into refining and perfecting. Creatives can prototype concepts or map out storyboards, while educators can create visual learning materials that wow their classrooms.

By accelerating Leonardo’s world-class AI technology and integrating it into Canva, we’re able to further empower every kind of professional to push the boundaries on the creative and strategic aspects of their work – leading to faster, more innovative, and more compelling visual communication.

An exciting future ahead

We’ve been incredibly impressed by how quickly the brilliant team at Leonardo has been able to innovate, and we’re excited about the extraordinary potential of what we can do together. Leonardo’s ethos of democratizing AI by supercharging human creativity is also very aligned with our mission, culture, and values.

Leonardo will continue to operate independently and focus on rapid innovation, model research, and product development.

They’ll continue to build Leonardo.Ai and their existing (and upcoming!) products with the backing and support from our resources and licensed data, but no Canva user content will be shared with Leonardo unless Canva users have chosen to expressly opt-in. We’re looking forward to integrating their foundational models into Canva and making them available to our global community over time.

The partnership between Canva and Leonardo.Ai is set to unlock new levels of creativity and design in the generative AI space. We’ll be sharing more soon, so stay tuned! In the meantime, you can read more about our journey with AI below.

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