In its second acquisition of the year, Canva Inc. is acquiring the image-generation firm Leonardo.ai, stepping up its push into artificial intelligence to challenge Adobe Inc., the market leader in creative software.
Canva can now include the smaller company’s video and picture generating models in its own products thanks to the agreement, which took approximately a month to complete. According to co-founder Cameron Adams, this is Canva’s fastest acquisition to date, Bloomberg News said. It shut down only a few months after the largest startup in Australia acquired the Affinity software package, which is widely used by Mac customers of Apple Inc., in a transaction valued at several hundred million pounds. Canva did not provide a price for Leonardo.ai, and Adams would not provide further information.
This year, Canva, a creative software firm on the rise, raised capital at a valuation of $26 billion, putting it in competition with industry leader Adobe. ByteDance Ltd., the company behind TikTok, is rapidly expanding its user base with CapCut, an app for editing videos.
With its most recent acquisition, Canva gets a 120-person team at Leonardo.ai, which develops software that enables users to create and modify photos online using text prompts. Blackbird Ventures, a Canva investor, supports the 2022-founded firm, which raised $31 million in funding last year. Over the previous 18 months, users have created over a billion photos on Canva’s platform, the company stated.
This year, Canva, a creative software firm on the rise, raised capital at a valuation of $26 billion, putting it in competition with industry leader Adobe. ByteDance Ltd., the company behind TikTok, is rapidly expanding its user base with CapCut, an app for editing videos.
With its most recent acquisition, Canva gets a 120-person team at Leonardo.ai, which develops software that enables users to create and modify photos online using text prompts. Blackbird Ventures, a Canva investor, supports the 2022-founded firm, which raised $31 million in funding last year. Over the previous 18 months, users have created over a billion photos on Canva’s platform, the company stated.
With the addition of Leonardo.ai’s services, Canva’s increasing range of AI capabilities is expected to attract some of Adobe’s largest commercial clients and spur revenue growth.
Canva, which was founded a decade ago by Adams, Cliff Obrecht, and Melanie Perkins, has become a rival to Adobe, which has long been the industry leader in graphics software. Despite the recent addition of AI functionality to many of its products, Adobe’s stock has dropped more than 10% so far this year as a result of the collapse of a $20 billion acquisition bid for Figma in December.
Although Canva hasn’t disclosed specific intentions for going public, investors have long considered the business as a potential acquisition. In a previous interview, co-founder and chief operating officer Obrecht stated that the company had just finished selling $2.5 billion in secondary shares.
Eight businesses, including Affinity, visual AI firm Kaleido.ai, and picture distributors Pexels and Pixabay, have now been acquired by the Australian upstart.
“Generative AI can’t be a one-trick pony,” stated Adams, the chief product officer of Canva. “We’re entering a whole new world of being able to change and adapt the output generative AI is giving you.”