It’s a transaction that should help boost Australia’s relevance in generative AI technologies. It’s also a deal that Leonardo.ai co-founder Jachin Bhasme said was negotiated over a beer, between Leonardo.ai co-founder JJ Fiasson and billionaire Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht.

“At the time we were gearing up for our Series B [capital] raise, and we wanted to expand and build out our AI research function. It was not long after we’d released Phoenix, and to get the call from Cliff, for him and JJ to grab a beer, was definitely surprising,” Bhasme said.

“When the offer came through, JJ brought it back to us, and we were all really excited about the idea. [...] There was just a really solid alignment of values and goals, and ultimately, for what we wanted to do, it made a lot of sense.”

Three months after the acquisition, Canva is launching “Dream Lab”. Accessible from the Canva homepage, users can enter a simple text description and Leonardo’s Phoenix model will generate dynamic photos or graphics.

Bhasme said that Leonardo is allowed to still operate as it had been previously, as a separate independent entity within Canva, and would be retaining its brand and its strategy. He said no staff had departed as a result of the acquisition.

Canva is also on Wednesday launching a slew of new features including AI-powered whiteboards, automatically generated captions for videos and advanced animation effects.

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The company may have won over 200 million users with its easy-to-use design software, now widely used in social media and educational settings, but its next battleground is in the high-margin enterprise market.

Canva commands just 4 per cent share of the creative software market, compared to its much larger rival Adobe, which holds more than 70 per cent.

That’s a process that will be crucial ahead of a mooted IPO, likely on the tech-heavy Nasdaq, but one Kawalsky said will take some time.

“Canva is being used by 95 per cent of the Fortune 500, but it’s often being used by individual teams to get work done. It’s happening in pockets, across different areas of the business,” he said.

“There’s this journey that we need to go on with IT administrators and in the C-suite about how to take all that passionate usage and turn it into enterprise level plans that makes sense for them and meets all their needs.”

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