On February 23, Kaleido revealed in a press release that after years of declining “numerous opportunities for investment,” the Austrian startup has joined forces with another design technology company.
Kaleido Joins the Canva Family
Graphic design platform Canva has acquired Kaleido, the makers of popular background removal tools remove.bg and Unscreen. Kaleido claims that last year, over 100 million people from more than 180 countries used the two tools.
We do not know the exact price and terms of the acquisition, but TechCrunch writes that the deal may have been sealed with nearly nine figures.
“With our deeply aligned missions, overlapping roadmap and synergies across every aspect of the company, it was easy to see the incredible potential and opportunity in joining the Canva family,” writes Kaleido press contact Bernhard Holzer.
Kaleido was founded in 2013 with the goal of making it easier for both individuals and businesses alike to take advantage of the recent advancements of visual AI.
Six years would pass before the company would release remove.bg, a tool that made the process of removing a background from an image—which can take several minutes of editing—almost instantaneous. Unscreen was introduced in 2020, which did the same task but for videos instead (seems simple, but is far more difficult to pull off well).
What Is Canva?
Canva is a graphic design platform that aims to make design more accessible to the average person with its easy-to-use tools and ready-made templates. You can use it to create a variety of visual content: just about anything from social media graphics and presentations to posters and documents.
The platform is free to use, but also offers paid subscriptions if you want additional functions such as access to premium stock images, cloud storage, and the ability to schedule posts to social media.
Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, and Cameron Adams founded Canva in Sydney, Australia in January 2012.
Canva’s Other Acquisitions
Canva has quite the ever-growing list of acquisitions. At around the same time as Kaleido, Canva also acquired Smartmockups, a generator that allows you to quickly create realistic design mockups for t-shirts, flyers, mugs, books, magazines, and more.
In 2019, Canva acquired both Pexels and Pixabay, two of the world’s biggest free stock content sites, which only further expanded its stock library. A year before that, Canva expanded its creative reach by acquiring web-based presentation maker Zeetings.
Canva Continues to Grow
Following Canva’s announcement that the company just closed a $60 million funding round (bringing its valuation to $6 billion), these acquisitions only add more jewels to the company’s crown.
And while Canva can’t quite yet stand up to Adobe’s creative empire, it’s certainly making itself noticed.