Presentations.ai, an Indian startup that uses AI to help companies quickly generate presentation decks, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Accel to scale its software that has emerged from beta after amassing millions of users.
Presentations are ubiquitous throughout a business journey — whether a large corporation or a startup — to acquire new customers, update investors, and communicate milestones internally. Yet, businesses still struggle, spending hours cracking compelling presentations, which is even more critical when targeting clients or investors.
“People struggle to take the first draft of a presentation,” said Sumanth Raghavendra, co-founder and CEO of Presenations.ai, in an exclusive interview.
The Bengaluru-based startup has made that easier with its AI-powered platform, used by over 5 million people worldwide since its public beta launch in 2023, according to the company. “We want to be the ChatGPT for presentation. Think about making a presentation using AI, using that same construct that ChatGPT operates under,” Raghavendra told TechCrunch.
Founded in 2019, Presentations.ai saw ChatGPT’s emergence in late 2022 as the moment to come out of stealth and start onboarding new users. The startup amassed a million users within three months of its public beta and is currently making “millions of dollars” in profit, Raghavendra said.
Before Presentations.ai, Raghvendra founded Deck App Technologies, which developed an app to help people create business content using smartphones. However, he noted that the earlier venture had a “limited degree of success” as mobile devices did not become an instrument to create content other than videos.
Over the years, Raghvendra said that his team had created IPs around building presentations that helped Presentations.ai to emerge as a competitive player even in the crowded space where both startups and even big tech companies like Google and Microsoft are trying to ease presentation-building using generative AI.
“Because we have been doing this for so many years, I’m fairly confident that we are far ahead of anybody else, and the proof of the pudding for us is that a lot of users who come in pay us to use our software. They have typically tried other competitors, including whatever Google or Microsoft has,” Raghvendra asserted.
After gaining initial traction, the startup transitioned from a completely free experience for beta testers into a freemium offering in early 2024. Since then, Raghvendra told TechCrunch it has “tens of thousands” of paying users who pay for its service, starting at an annual price of $200 per user in the U.S., with different tiers and localized pricing across markets.
The startup utilizes “frontier” LLMs along with its own small language models created for specific tasks, such as deciding which chart best fits a particular topic. It also uses text-to-image models Flux and Stable Diffusion to help users quickly generate images to be used in the presentations with prompts.
Presentations.ai provides tools including theme palettes and presentation styles to generate decks based on user preferences. It also offers features including an AI-powered design assistant to create presentations based on different ideas, sharing and real-time sync, and multilingual support.
Similarly, the startup provides brand templates to match the style of users’ particular brands. It also lets people export their presentations to a PowerPoint file for further editing or as a PDF.
Presentations.ai specifically includes “guardrails” to assure enterprise customers it has a high bar against the competition. These guardrails, Raghvendra said, are built using the data pipelines the startup has built over time to restrict hallucination, the colloquial term of AI-generated inaccurate or misleading content. The platform also lets enterprises restrict access to sensitive data they do not want to be shared with other users, such as the financial information with the CFO that the front-line staff should not access.
The startup also allows hosting a private instance of the software. Additionally, it provides organization-wide licenses to let employees collaborate on a particular presentation.
Raghvendra told TechCrunch the startup plans to use the seed funding to launch a dedicated presentation agent to create presentations within any application. It also plans to have an enterprise sales team.
So far, Raghvendra said the startup has spent “zero” on its marketing. Also, since it owns IPs, the executive said its AI patent costs are relatively lower and have higher profitability margins than other startups enabling presentations using AI.
The startup gets 20% of its revenues from the U.S. followed by India. It also counts the U.K., Germany, Australia, Canada, and the Middle East among its key markets.
The seed round included participation from learned Indian entrepreneurs including Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED’s Kunal Shah, Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubhootham, and RedBus’ Phanindra Sama, among others.
