Overview Leonardo AI is the image generation platform that game studios, indie developers, and concept artists quietly built their asset pipelines on top of. Founded in Sydney in late 2022 by JJ Fiasson, Chris Gillis, Jachin Bhasme, and Peter Runham — a team from the gaming and tech space rather than the ML research pipeline — Leonardo launched publicly in early 2023 with a very specific pitch: not a general purpose image toy, but a production tool for people who need to generate game assets, characters, environments, textures, and consistent illustrated style at scale. In mid 2026, that positioning has held. Canva acquired Leonardo in July 2024 for a reported $200+ million, and rather than absorbing the product, kept it running as an independent brand aimed at the pro creator segment Canva itself does not reach. What sets Leonardo apart is a stack of workflow tooling built around the models rather than around a single prompt box. The core generator is one surface. Beyond it: fine tune a custom model on your own art (native LoRA training with a real UI), lock a character across scenes, generate consistent style asset runs, upload sketches for image to image with pose control, upscale to print resolution, and run all of it through a "Prompt Generation" helper that turns a one line description into a working prompt. Leonardo is the AI image tool that acts like a design app, not a research demo. The model lineup in 2026 covers Leonardo's own trained models…