Aussie start-up Leonardo.Ai reaches new milestones with AWS

In less than a year, Australian startup and generative artificial intelligence content production platform Leonardo.Ai has experienced exponential growth, particularly after switching over to using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support its ambitions.

Since launching in December 2022, Leonardo.Ai’s users have generated more than 700 million images, and trained more than 400,000 custom generative AI models, on the company’s platform. 

The startup is changing the way content is created, allowing users globally to easily generate ideas and hyper-realistic images ranging from environments to portraits suitable for videos, games, and websites across industries, including gaming, media, entertainment, and marketing. 

Leonardo.Ai also has one of the largest generative AI communities globally, becoming the third most popular Discord channel with more than 1.8 million members.

Leonardo.Ai chose AWS to be its cloud provider due to a rapid influx of users, which its previous cloud provider could not accommodate. 

To maintain high performance along with a quality user experience, Leonardo.Ai was forced to introduce a waitlist to cap its organic growth. 

To remediate this situation, the startup migrated its workloads to AWS in less than two weeks, and the resiliency, security, and scalability of AWS’s global infrastructure allowed Leonardo.Ai to efficiently manage the continuous surge in user growth. 

To accelerate Leonardo.Ai’s global growth ambitions, the company is using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Inf2 instances for low-cost and high-performance generative AI inference, as well as for running several large language models (LLMs). 

Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia2, the second-generation AWS Inferentia accelerator. Using Inf2 instances, the startup achieved a 60 per cent reduction in inferencing costs while accelerating their language model inference speeds by up to 35 per cent.

“The generative AI space is evolving quickly, and AWS is helping us shape this industry with its technical support, business development, and mentorship,” Leonardo.Ai co-founder and CTO Peter Runham said. 

“Our rapid growth is only possible by scaling our workloads on AWS to meet rising user demand. In less than a year, our users have generated an astonishing 700 million images on our platform. If you spent just one second looking at each image, it would take you over 19 years of non-stop viewing to see them all.

“AWS also connected us with its vast network of innovative AI partners, which was vital for our growth. We’re currently exploring how Amazon Bedrock can help our customers’ diverse creative use cases.”

In May, Leonardo.AI was selected as the first startup in Asia-Pacific to participate in the global AWS Generative AI Accelerator, which provides promising startups up to US$300,000 in AWS credits to build and refine their offerings, mentorship from AI and machine learning (ML) industry leaders, networking opportunities, and technical support from AWS product teams. 

Since going through the program, AWS has been core to the startup’s ability to scale internationally and rapidly. AWS also helped the Leonardo.Ai team manage AWS infrastructure, secure graphics card unit provisioning, and provide technical support that allowed the Leonardo.Ai team to focus more on expanding its capabilities and growing its user community.

“Leveraging Amazon Bedrock, Leonardo.Ai will be able to quickly experiment with a variety of foundational models from leading AI companies, driving a new era of creativity and expressive imagination,” AWS vice president of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Bratin Saha said.

Leonardo.Ai recently launched an iOS mobile application, allowing users to easily use its platform to alter the style and tone of uploaded images on a mobile device, and also created an API to meet the expanding demand for AI-generated production-quality images.

In September, Leonardo.Ai integrated its API with its first enterprise customer, Singapore-based Razer, to deliver Axon Create, which empowers Razer users to create high-definition wallpaper for their PCs on demand using generative AI.

“We wanted to allow our customers to easily personalise their gaming setups. Partnering with Leonardo.Ai was a natural fit when it came to Axon Create,” Razer vice president of software, Quyen Quach said. 

“For gamers, by gamers is our guiding principle for product development, and Leonardo.Ai’s ability to understand gaming language resulted in a seamless experience for our gamers to generate artwork that aligns with their specific interests.”