It totally makes sense to me that Canva acquired Leonardo AI. Canva also recently acquired Affinity, a popular Adobe suite alternative.
But something I feel a lot of people miss is that most gen AI tools like Leonardo are basically front ends for running Stable Diffusion.
They rely on SD for updates to improve their quality and push new features. It’s why every product in the SD ecosystem seems to push the same features at the same time.
Unless they’re doing foundational research and building their own models, these products have no moat.
It’s just a race to see who can acquire the most users the fastest and hold onto them through good-enough UX in hopes a larger player like Canva snags them up when they’re ready to jump into AI.
Even tho Leonardo’s value isn’t really its tech, they were early, grew a solid user base, and kept them loyal through friendly UX
It’s actually a perfect fit for Canva, who is already pro at user friendly design tools and seems to be making moves to aggressively expand capabilities quickly without starting from scratch.
Author: Nick St. Pierre
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