Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica and will fold the team into a new design research lab led by Lica’s co-founders, Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta.
Deal background and Lica’s trajectory
Lica launched in 2023 as an app that turned screenshots and recordings into project presentations and videos. The startup raised $4 million the following year from investors that included Accel, South Park Commons and Village Global, and later shifted focus to creating marketing videos for e-commerce sites that adhered to brand guidelines.
Kalyanaraman said the founders and Gamma’s CEO, Lee Grant, were already in contact through shared investors, and that both companies pursue a similar goal of simplifying visual communication. She added that Lica concentrated on frontier research and user access, while Gamma had built distribution to more than 100 million users—factors that led the teams to combine efforts.
Research focus and product plans
Gamma will continue to prioritize presentations as a core use case, but the company has also begun offering image generation and now intends to explore additional formats of visual communication through the new research division. Lee said the effort aims to rethink what presentations can look like, how people engage with them and what visuals and interactivity are possible, describing those questions as central to the company’s view of communication.
Mehta said the research team will work on personalizing presentation and communication styles for different audiences and tastes, and on building a platform that produces strong initial outputs that users can then edit for specific viewers.
Gamma has not disclosed specific products that will result from the acquisition. The company said it wants to build fluid, multimodal presentations and other communication modalities.
The deal comes amid heavy investor interest in AI presentation tools: Prezent has raised $50 million in two rounds; Gamma itself raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation; Presentations.ai has Accel backing; and OpenAI recently acquired NextSlide.
Original source: TechCrunch AI