Canva has announced plans to acquire Leonardo.ai, an Australian startup that generates artificial intelligence content and research, as part of its goal to build “a world-class visual artificial intelligence tool suite.” Although financial terms were not disclosed, the deal will give Canva access to Leonardo.ai’s family of user-customizable text-to-image and text-to-video generators.
Canva has recently made efforts to diversify its platform with more office suite-like tools, but the visual design and communications platform remains one of the biggest competitors to Adobe’s line of creative software products. The acquisition of Affinity may help Canva compete with Adobe software such as Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, and Leonardo.ai may similarly become an alternative to Adobe Firefly for generating AI models.
Leonardo.ai tells TechCrunch Its models are trained using “licensed, synthetic, publicly available/open source materials,” which is even vaguer than Adobe’s training disclosure for Firefly. Still, Adobe faced backlash for a recent policy update that forced the company to explicitly state that user profiles will not be used to train the company’s generative artificial intelligence models. Canva has an opportunity to position itself as a growing alternative, but it will need to proceed with caution to avoid Adobe-like scrutiny from creators who have similar reservations about generating artificial intelligence.
