Canva has released Canva Craft, the company’s first image-generation model built by its research team. Canva described the system as a two-stage process: first it interprets a user prompt and builds a plan that encodes spatial relationships, relative scale, visual hierarchy and information for text generation; second it renders an image at up to 2K resolution and in up to 30 aspect ratios for different platforms.
Training approach and design conversion
Rather than relying on photographs, Canva said it trained Canva Craft on human-designed templates from its library, including posters, social posts, presentations, infographics, menus and typography-rich layouts. Because of that training set, Canva said images produced by Canva Craft can be converted into layered designs using Canva Magic, the company’s image-to-design transformer.
Canva also noted that the two-stage approach aims to produce accurate object details and legible text, and to allow users to make precise edits without altering unrelated parts of an image.
Availability, integrations and business context
Canva said Canva Craft is available to all users on the platform via the Dream Lab tab and will be accessible through the Canva API. The company plans to support image generation inside third-party chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini through Canva’s MCP. Canva added that researchers from Leonardo.ai, a platform the company acquired in 2024, contributed to the development of the new model.
The company said it has used several external image models for generation and expects Canva Craft to reduce API costs while giving Canva more control over quality and speed. Canva also stated it is developing two cost-efficient variants, Craftfast and Craft-ultrafast, which will be released soon.
Separately, Canva was reportedly on track for $4 billion in revenue last year. After cutting its growth forecast for 2026, external analysts reported the company’s valuation declined from $42 billion to $35 billion. Canva said Canva Craft is live now in Dream Lab and will appear via the Canva API and partner integrations as planned.
Original source: TechCrunch AI