Presentation startup Gamma has acquired design firm Lica to establish an internal research lab. The two co-founders of Lica will lead the new unit.
Lica began as a tool converting screenshots and recordings into project presentations and videos. Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta founded the company in 2023. Investors including Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global provided $4 million a year later. The business recently concentrated on helping e-commerce sites produce marketing videos that follow brand guidelines.
Kalyanaraman stated Lica aimed to build AI models around communication methods, including video and design. The founders knew Gamma CEO Lee Grant because both companies received backing from Accel and South Park Commons. Those discussions led to the purchase.
“We have a very similar North Star vision of wanting to make visual communication easy. We focused a lot on frontier research and making sure that became accessible to users. But that’s just one part of the solution. Gamma had focused a lot on building distribution, taking the application to 100 million-plus users. Given how fast things are moving, we decided to join forces,” Kalyanaraman told TechCrunch.
Gamma continues helping people build presentations. Like other design companies, it also offers image generation. The company now wants to explore different formats of communication with the new research division.
“Presentations for us are today a core use case, but how do we expand what presentations look and feel like, and how do people engage with them in the future? What visuals are possible? How interactive are they? These [questions] all require us to think deeply about the core responsibility of communication. This is why we’re excited to invest in this area, because we don’t think anybody else is thinking at that level,” Lee said.
Lica’s Mehta said the new research division would work on customizing the presentation and communication styles of AI models for different audiences and tastes.
“The point of the presentation is to communicate a large goal. We are thinking about building a platform where these two goals can be personalized to such an extent that you just get a really good output, and then you’re able to edit for different audiences,” she said.
Gamma did not reveal specific products planned from the acquisition. It said it wants to create fluid, multimodal presentations and other communication modalities.
AI presentation startups have received tons of investor attention and money over the last few years. Prezent raised $50 million in two rounds. Gamma raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. Presentations.ai was also backed by Accel. We are even starting to see some consolidation in this category: Earlier this month, OpenAI acquired NextSlide.
What it means
Users will likely see more varied output styles as the new team adjusts AI models to specific tastes. The focus shifts from simply generating slides to tailoring the entire communication experience for different groups.
