Leonardo.Ai begins a second life under Canva
Two months after Canva bought Leonardo.Ai, the startup's artificial intelligence model is powering the design giant's flashiest new feature.
Earlier this year Leonardo.Ai was in talks with VCs to fund its Series B. Instead of investors, it found a buyer: Canva acquired the startup in August.
The first seeds planted by that buyout sprouted on Wednesday, when Canva launched Dream Lab, a text-to-image generator that runs off the startup’s Phoenix AI model.
That is good for Canva — but what about Leonardo.Ai? In lieu of a fresh capital injection, the outfit, which will continue to operate as its own entity, has the backing from one of Australia’s biggest tech companies. That means not only access to a bigger talent pool, but also the costly GPUs crucial for AI development.
“Every researcher needs access to compute, so you’re going to need to scale your compute for that reason,” said Leonardo.AI founder JJ Fiasson. “As we scale research capability, having more compute allows you to do more things in parallel, run more experiments, explore different avenues across a wider range of modalities.”
