Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica to create its own design institute, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. Lica’s co-founders will lead this effort.
Lica started as an app that allowed you to turn screenshots and recordings into project presentations and videos. Founded in 2023 by Priya Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta, the company raised $4 million a year later from investors including Accel, SouthPark Commons and Village Global. In recent years, the company has focused on working with e-commerce sites to create marketing videos that adhere to brand guidelines.
Kalyanaraman said the founders were familiar with Gamma CEO Lee Grant, as Rika wants to build AI models around communication methods such as video and design, and both companies are backed by Accel and South Park Commons. These conversations ultimately led to the acquisition.
“Northstar’s vision of making visual communication easier is very similar to ours. We focused on cutting-edge research and making it accessible to users. But it’s not just part of the solution. Gamma was focused on building distribution and delivering the application to over 100 million users. Given how fast things move, we decided to collaborate,” Kalyanaraman told TechCrunch.
Gamma will continue to focus on assisting with presentation creation, but like other design companies, we have also started offering image generation. The company now says it wants to explore different forms of communication with the new research division.
“Presentations are a core use case for us today, but how do we extend the look and feel of presentations and how do people engage with them in the future? What kind of visuals are possible? How interactive are they? All of these (questions) require us to think deeply about our core responsibilities in communication. That’s why we’re excited to invest in this space, because we don’t think anyone else is thinking at that level,” Lee said.
Lica’s Mehta said the new research arm will work on customizing the presentation and communication styles of AI models to suit different audiences and preferences.
“The point of a presentation is to communicate a big goal, and we’re thinking about building a platform where you can personalize those two goals to a certain extent and get really good deliverables that can then be edited for different audiences,” she said.
Gamma did not say what products it plans to build as a result of the acquisition, but said it wants to create fluid, multimodal presentations and other means of communication.
AI presentation startups have received a ton of investor attention and funding in recent years. Prezent has raised $50 million in two rounds. Gamma raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. And Presentations.ai was also backed by Accel. We are starting to see some consolidation in this category. Earlier this month, OpenAI acquired NextSlide.
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