Canva adds a new generative AI platform to its growing creative empire

Canva has announced plans to acquire Leonardo.ai, an Australian generative AI content and research startup, as part of its goal to build a “world-class suite of visual AI tools.” While financial terms haven’t been disclosed, the deal will see Canva gain access to Leonardo.ai’s lineup of user-customizable text-to-image and text-to-video generators.

Canva has made efforts to diversify its platform with more office suite-like tools of late, but the visual design and communications platform remains one of the biggest competitors to Adobe’s lineup of creative software products. Where the Affinity acquisition may help Canva to compete against Adobe software like Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, Leonardo.ai could be similarly poised as an alternative to Adobe’s Firefly generative AI models.

Leonardo.ai told TechCrunch that its models are trained using “licensed, synthetic, and publicly available/open source data,” which is vaguer than Adobe’s training disclosure for Firefly. Despite this, Adobe suffered backlash to a recent policy update that forced it to explicitly state that user data wouldn’t be used to train the company’s generative AI models. Canva has an opportunity to position itself as a growing alternative, but it needs to tread carefully to avoid any Adobe-like scrutiny from creators who hold similar reservations about generative AI.