Canva’s Leonardo.ai acquisition bears fruit, accelerating AI push with Dream Lab

Think of this as the third chapter being written. Canva, which still remains a unique visual communication platform because of its spacious gamut of tools, isn’t slowing down on feature additions even though the year may be slowly drawing to a close. Of course, the underlying theme revolves around artificial intelligence (AI), particularly for new features added to the Visual Suite. It is interesting that Canva’s been able to effectively assimilate Leonardo.ai’s Phoenix foundational model into their platform, less than three months on from acquiring the company, to create a new product called Dream Lab.
“Fundamentally, when we come across a world class team doing amazing things which we can kind of accelerate with our team, our distribution and by baking their technology into a product, it is just such a harmonious combination,” says Robert Kawalsky, Head of Product at Canva, in a conversation with HT. This certainly has been a harmonious integration, both ways. The Phoenix foundation model will power the new image generation capabilities that arrive in Canva, now.
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Dream Lab’s image generation, will find competition from many a text to image generative tool available on the internet including OpenAI’s Dall-E, Midjourney as well as Adobe’s Firefly, as well as more casually accessible tools including the Microsoft Copilot and Meta AI that is now part of WhatsApp and Instagram too. Canva bets big on its capabilities to create variations in more than 15 styles, including 3D renders and illustrations. Users will also be able to point the tool to a reference image for output influence, and Canva says this will also create complex multi-subject images and photorealistic portraits. The company is betting big on seamless integration within the suite, wherein the generations can be moved sideways with Canva’s other tools for further edits and use in created materials.
“As we double down on empowering everyone to turn their ideas into designs, we’re introducing dozens of new features across our Visual Suite at the intersection of creativity and productivity. From more interactive designs to a suite of AI-powered upgrades, we hope these new features help our community to continue achieving their goals,” says Melanie Perkins, Co-Founder and CEO of Canva.
Visual Suite too, sees a new set of updates that will be available from today. These include smarter whiteboards with AI-powered sorting and summarising, along with interactive ‘Reaction Stickies’ to help teammates vote on ideas in real time. Magic Write is adopting new contextual text generation for more accurate output. Docs and Whiteboards are now better placed for handling data, with Area Charts, Radar Charts, Hierarchy Charts, and Statistical Charts.
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For organisations and teams that use Canva for editing videos, adding now are new advanced animation effects and automatically generated captions that can be matched to a brand’s style. Artlist integration is incoming too, with a Premium Video Library for music and cinematic video assets from what they say are ‘top industry artists’.
Now, Canva crosses the 200 million active user mark globally, up from the 180 million number the company had shared with HT in April, at the time when they announced the new Magic Suite updates at the Create keynote. The company shares more numbers. They say the annualised revenue is now $2.5 billion, up from $2 billion last year. The company says that five months since the introduction of Canva Enterprise, a subscription proposition for large organisations, the likes of NYSE, Atlassian, HP, Ray White, DHL Express, Tecnocasa, and Docusign are on board.
“The usage of Canva’s AI tools has skyrocketed, with over 10 billion uses to date,” they say, in a statement.
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Referencing back to why this latest set of updates are actually akin to the third chapter being written. In October last year, Canva made its first coherent, consumer facing artificial intelligence (AI) bet with Magic Suite, something that made rivals including Adobe sit up to take notice. Subsequently, the Create keynote in May detailed a significant set of updates across the board, including AI tools for video editing. Alongside, sharpened focused with an enterprise focused Visual Suite, which also includes OpenAI’s models powering AI text generation in Docs, presentations, and whiteboards.
There is a broadening of scope for Work Kits, introduced earlier this year. In addition to ones that focus on sales, marketing, HR, and creative workflows, Canva’s adding Work Kits for small business owners, teachers and students. For instance, these kits for teachers will focus on key learning and classroom challenges, refreshing lesson plans, managing workloads, and encouraging creativity. For students, they’ll be able to use these to get assistance with homework, organize their study plans, and improve presentations likely to be delivered in-class.