Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Lica, an Accel-backed design startup, to spin up its own design research lab. TechCrunch AI broke the news exclusively, reporting that Lica’s co-founders, Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta, will lead the new effort. The deal folds a frontier-research team into a company that’s already pushed AI presentations to a mass audience.
What stands out here is the pairing. Lica went deep on AI models for visual communication. Gamma went deep on distribution. Now they’re one team.
What happened
Here’s the shape of the deal, according to TechCrunch AI:
- Gamma acquired Lica to launch a dedicated design research division.
- Lica’s two co-founders will run it.
- Terms weren’t disclosed, and Gamma hasn’t said what products will come out of it.
Lica started in 2023 as an app that turned screenshots and recordings into presentations and videos. A year later it raised $4 million from Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. More recently it worked with e-commerce brands to generate marketing videos that stick to brand guidelines.
The two companies already ran in the same circles. Both are backed by Accel and South Park Commons, and Lica’s founders knew Gamma CEO Grant Lee. Those conversations turned into an acquisition.
Why it matters
This is significant because it signals where AI presentation tools are heading next. The first wave was about generating slides fast. The next wave is about rethinking what a presentation even is.
Lee framed the ambition directly. “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?” he told TechCrunch AI. He added that Gamma is investing here “because we don’t think anybody else is thinking at that level.”
Kalyanaraman said the two companies shared a “North Star vision of wanting to make visual communication easy.” Lica had the research. Gamma had the reach, with a goal of taking its app past 100 million users. “Given how fast things are moving, we decided to join forces,” she said.
The technical angle
The research division is going after personalization at the model level. Mehta said the team wants to customize how AI models communicate for different audiences and tastes.
The idea works like this: you set one core goal for a presentation, and the platform tailors the output to a specific audience. Then you edit and re-target it for another audience without starting over. Gamma says it wants “fluid, multimodal” presentations that blend formats rather than static slides. It’s already added image generation, following the same path as other design companies.
The bigger picture
AI presentation startups have pulled in serious money. A few markers from TechCrunch AI’s report:
- Prezent raised $50 million across two rounds.
- Gamma raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation.
- Presentations.ai is also backed by Accel.
Now the category is consolidating. Earlier this month, OpenAI acquired NextSlide. Gamma buying Lica is the second notable tuck-in for this space in a matter of weeks, and that’s the trend worth watching. When a category attracts this much capital, the strong players start absorbing the specialists instead of competing with them.
For practitioners, the near-term read is simple. The tools you use to build decks are about to get more personalized and more interactive, and the companies behind them are racing to own the research that makes that possible. Expect the line between a slide, a video, and an interactive doc to keep blurring.
Gamma hasn’t shown what it’ll ship from this. But the bet is clear: own the research, own the distribution, and redefine the format before anyone else does. More details are available in the original TechCrunch AI report.