Graphic design company Canva announced it is acquiring fellow Australian startup Leonardo AI with plans to have Leonardo’s 120 employees, including executives, join the Canva AI team. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sydney-based Leonardo has been gaining attention for its advanced generative AI platform that helps users create images and art based on the open-source Stable Diffusion model developed by Stability AI. The Leonardo team claims its offering is different than other AI art platforms since it provides users with more control. Users can experiment with text prompts and quick sketches as Leonardo.ai creates photorealistic images in real time.

“Leonardo started in 2022 with a mission to optimize the generation of video game assets,” reports VentureBeat. Company founders Jachin Bhasme, J.J. Fiasson and Chris Gillis sought “a solution to address high production costs and long development cycles in game development, but they soon realized the value of the technology in other areas and expanded to categories like advertising, marketing, product design, fashion and education.”

Leonardo currently “offers collaboration tools and a private cloud for models, including video generators, as well as access to APIs that let customers build their own tech infrastructure on top of Leonardo.ai’s platform,” writes TechCrunch. It touts more than “19 million registered users, and its tools have been used to create more than a billion images.”

Canva, now nearly 12 years old, generates close to $2 billion in revenue and has over 180 million monthly worldwide users.

According to Leonardo Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams, the startup’s technology, including its flagship model Phoenix, will be integrated with Canva’s Magic Studio generative AI suite.

“We’ll look to integrate Leonardo’s technology into Magic Studio, which we’re very excited about,” he said. “This might include making existing Magic Studio tools more powerful, or introducing new generative AI capabilities powered by Leonardo’s models directly in Canva.”

“Leonardo’s intuitive capabilities fuse simplicity and power to produce incredible results,” Canva’s announcement suggests. “Its models can generate stunning images in styles ranging from hyper-realistic photos to character portraits, anime, painterly styles, and more. Its AI video generation tool brings almost any concept to dynamic life, from animated illustrations to storytelling sequences.”

“Canva has been building its AI capabilities for quite some time as part of its effort to take on the rise of new-age creative companies like Midjourney, Stability AI and Ideogram as well as already massive and continually evolving industry leader Adobe,” explains VentureBeat.