Gamma acquires Accel-backed design startup Lica

Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica in a bid to build out its own design research lab, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Lica’s co-founders will lead the effort.

Lica started off as an app that could turn screenshots and recordings into project presentations and videos. Founded by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta in 2023, the company a year later raised $4 million from investors including Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. Over the past couple of years, it has focused on working with e-commerce sites to create marketing videos that adhere to brand guidelines.

Kalyanaraman said Lica wanted to build AI models around communication methods, including video and design, and the founders were familiar with Gamma’s CEO, Lee Grant, as both companies are backed by Accel and South Park Commons. Those conversations eventually led to the acquisition.

“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 will continue to focus on helping people build presentations, but like other design companies, it’s also started offering image generation. The company says it 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 didn’t reveal what products it plans to build as a result of this acquisition, but it did say that 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; and Presentations.ai was also backed by Accel. We’re even starting to see some consolidation in this category: Earlier this month, OpenAI acquired NextSlide.