Leonardo.AI had a bumper 2024. In June it released Phoenix, Australia’s first generative AI foundational model. In July, the company was acquired by Canva – and over the last month, Leonardo shipped its latest product, Flow State. Forbes Australia chats to founder JJ Fiasson about the company’s powerful partnerships and rapid rise.
Leonardo.AI has amassed 29 million global registered users in the two years since it was founded by JJ Fiasson, Ethan Smith, and Jachin Bhasme. Those users have created over a billion artworks using generative AI.
The Sydney startup attracted the attention of big-name investors Blackbird and Side Stage Ventures in 2023 before being acquired by Australian decacorn Canva in July 2024.
Now, the meteoric rise of Leonardo is being catapulted a step further.
“Our newest release called Flow State is about extremely high-speed outputs and enabling people to interact with image generation in a bit of a different way,” JJ Fiasson says in an exclusive interview with Forbes Australia.
“We call it Flow State because it’s so fast and seamless and encourages creative exploration and it’s very very flexible – it can do anything from a cute creature to photorealism to images with text in them.”
The value in Flow State, Fiasson says, is optionality and speed. The ‘flow’ of images that a user can select from include variables on its ‘vibe,’ angles, colour grading and lighting.
“It’s about letting people rapidly explore multiple different ideas. We use Google Cloud to actually take the user’s prompt and expand upon it in a whole myriad of different ways so that the user gets lots of different outputs based on their initial concept.”
Achieving multiple creative options instantly comes down to the inference time, and for that the right back-end needs to be utilised.
“When you’re trying to deliver to users something in sub five-seconds, we really need a very consistent turnaround time,” says Fiasson. “What we’ve seen with other solutions is very spiky response times, ranging anywhere from 2 seconds to 10 seconds. The quality of the way Gemini and Vertex expand upon a base user prompt to make it more interesting or diverse is very effective.”
The path to Flow State and Australian excellence in GenAI
“We’ve scaled like crazy since 2022,” says Fiasson. “We built Phoenix, which is Australia’s first foundational model.
“Our partnership with Google has allowed us to build at pace and continue scaling our user base really effectively.”
Paul Migliorini, Vice President of Google Cloud for ANZ, says Leonardo.AI embodies the country’s potential in the fast-growing generative AI space.
“Leonardo.AI is a prime example of Australia’s opportunity in generative AI, and how it can be used to turn ambitious ideas into vivid realities,” says Migliorini.
“Google Cloud’s infrastructure and Vertex AI platform are uniquely positioned to help fuel Leonardo’s next phase of growth by giving the company the scale, flexibility, and reliability to innovate, build new capabilities and ultimately bring to life the creative ambition of people around the world.”
According to the company, the creative fields that Leonardo.AI is currently creating artwork for, span advertising, marketing, design and architecture, film, fashion, photography, e-commerce, and education. The product offering is robust in part because of the work it has done to create Phoenix, the only LLM foundation model to come out of Australia so far.
“It’s been a very interesting journey for us as a company to be at the forefront of developing Australia’s first foundation model because it’s something that we managed to do on relatively limited resources and in a relatively short space of time,” says Fiasson.
“Some of the giants have billions of dollars behind them. We have a relatively small research team and do not have infinite amounts of compute. We were able to do something that we feel is quite substantial and beneficial for pushing the bar forward within the Australian environment.”
Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world. Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here or become a member here.
