Canva to Buy AI Startup in Year’s Second Deal to Catch Adobe
- It’s acquiring Australian image generation company Leonardo.ai
- AI is intensifying competition between creative app developers
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Canva Inc. is buying image generation startup Leonardo.ai in its second acquisition this year, accelerating a charge into artificial intelligence to take on creative software leader Adobe Inc.
The deal, which took about a month to finalize, lets Canva integrate the smaller firm’s video and image generation models into its own products. It’s the quickest acquisition yet for Canva, co-founder Cameron Adams told Bloomberg News. It closed just months after Australia’s biggest startup took over the Affinity suite of software popular with Apple Inc. Mac users, in a deal worth several hundred million pounds. Canva didn’t specify a valuation for Leonardo.ai, and Adams declined to elaborate.