How Leonardo.Ai fuels rapid growth with Contentsquare’s product analytics insights

Key metrics 

The company 

Leonardo.Ai is a creator-first generative AI platform that has generated over 4 billion images since its launch in December 2022. Acquired by Canva in mid-2024, Leonardo.Ai empowers creators worldwide to bring their visions to life with cutting-edge AI technology.

The challenge

As Leonardo.Ai scaled rapidly during its first year, the team faced a critical bottleneck: the analytics tools they were using at the time couldn't keep up with their product development pace. 

"Within our first year, we were scaling very rapidly, but the analytics tool we were using at the time was prohibitive to the speed at which we needed to ship features. And the manual custom event tracking was a laborious process," explained David Higgs, UX Research & Growth Lead at Leonardo.Ai.

For a fast-moving startup generating millions of data points daily, this limitation meant the team couldn't validate feature performance quickly enough or make data-informed decisions at the pace their growth demanded.

The solution

Leonardo.Ai adopted  Contentsquare's Product Analytics suite, powered by Heap, very early on in their startup phase, even before Canva acquired them. Contentsquare’s auto-capture capabilities immediately solved their speed-to-insight challenge.

"The auto-capture function gave us confidence that every click, user action, and page view was being captured, and we could then retrospectively go back and capture that data, understand user behavior, and make decisions moving forward from there.”

David Higgs

UX Research & Growth Lead

This meant the team could ship features without worrying about setting up tracking in advance—they could always go back and analyze the data they needed.

Here are 3 more ways Contentsquare’s Product Analytics suite is driving growth for Leonardo.Ai. 

1. Driving native mobile app growth

Using product analytics insights, Leonardo.AI discovered that their platform was primarily desktop-driven with peak usage during weekdays. This insight directly informed their native app strategy.

"This allowed us to segment our users across platform and subscription tiers and empowered us to further our research and uncover and pinpoint different areas of user frustration and drop-off," said David.

The results were impressive: within 90 days of implementing changes, Leonardo.Ai saw a +39% increase in iOS monthly active users and a +35% lift in iOS subscriptions.

2. Optimizing the onboarding journey and activation rates

The team used Product Analytics to identify key friction points in their new user journey that were impacting activation rates. 

"We were looking for ways to increase our activation rate. We used Product Analytics to measure the new user journey and find out that a high percentage of users were dropping off," explained Kieren Dight, Growth Product Manager at Leonardo.Ai.

After redesigning the onboarding experience based on these insights, Leonardo.Ai improved Day 1 activation by +20%, which led to a +17% uplift in early conversions.

3. Making fast, actionable insights accessible to everyone 

The platform isn't just used by data analysts and product teams—it's become a shared tool across the business.

"Product Analytics isn't just being used by our data and insights and product team, it's being adopted cross-functionally across our marketing, customer success teams, business development, and really empowering the teams to access data and self-serve," explained David. "We're definitely moving toward a culture where data and insights are more accessible and not just siloed to a specific data team."

Sense, Contentsquare’s AI agent, makes it simple for non-technical team members to get answers fast. "The AI capabilities built into the product analytics platform enable these team members to make a query about something they're interested in, and it very quickly produces not only the thinking of how the chart was produced but also the data that can be investigated later on," shared Kieren. 

Sense, Contentsquare’s AI allows Leonardo.Ai to ask questions about their user journey, and provides instant actionable insights. 

“We're always very busy, and what I really love is when a team member outside of data and insights comes to us with a chart that they've produced using Sense, asking us a query on what does this mean, which uncovers insights that we probably weren't looking at…which then leads us to dig a little bit deeper and find more information.”

David Higgs

UX Research & Growth Lead

Results

Since implementing Contentsquare's Product Analytics powered by Heap, Leonardo.Ai has seen measurable business impact across key metrics:

• +39% increase in iOS monthly active users

• +35% lift in iOS subscriptions

• +20% improvement in Day 1 activation rate

• +17% uplift in early conversions

Beyond the numbers, the platform has fundamentally changed how Leonardo.Ai operates. It’s helping the business scale faster, informing their product roadmap and putting the team on the right path for continuous improvement for their users.  "We have so many data points, millions of data points, and we ship features all the time," said Kieren. "It's really nice to be able to go find the needle in the haystack. That's something that this tool definitely empowers us to do."

“Product Analytics has helped us scale much faster. Our time is limited, having everyone be able to get the data and not have to worry about historical forms of it, it’s all there already, that’s been a huge time-saver for us.”

Kieren Dight

Product Manager

What's next

As Leonardo.AI's data and insights capabilities continue to expand, the team remains focused on building systems that are both robust and adaptable across teams. 

"Contentsquare will continue to be a trusted partner in that journey, helping us connect data, uncover insights, and turn them into meaningful customer experiences at scale."

David Higgs

UX Research & Growth Lead