Presentation.ai, an Indian startup that helps companies generate presentation decks using artificial intelligence, 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. Numerous Indian entrepreneurs also participated in the seed round, including Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED’s Kunal Shah, Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubhootham, and RedBus’ Phanindra Sama.
READ: Formula Insight unveils new platform to simplify equity research (December 6, 2024)
Presentation.ai uses AI to create PPTs, infographics, charts, timelines, project plans, reports, product roadmaps etc. While it was founded in 2019, it was with the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022 when it started onboarding new users and took off. The startup amassed a million users within three months of its public beta and is currently making “millions of dollars” in profit, founder Sumanth Raghavendra said.
Raghavendra had previously founded DeckApp, 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. Raghavendra is also the Co-founder of The Ken, a subscribers-only business journalism product headquartered out of Bengaluru, India.
Presentations are a ubiquitous part of business; however, people often struggle to make them, and Presentation.ai aims to fix that problem. “People struggle to take the first draft of a presentation,” Raghavendra said. “We want to be the ChatGPT for presentation. Think about making a presentation using AI, using that same construct that ChatGPT operates under.”
After gaining initial traction, the startup transitioned from a completely free experience for beta testers into a freemium offering in early 2024. It 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.
READ: This robotics startup has a sustainable solution for refurbishing discarded electronics (January 24, 2025)
It also provides tools, like different presentation styles and palettes, an AI-powered design assistant to create presentations based on different ideas, sharing and real-time sync, and multilingual support. Presentation.ai also provides brand templates to match the style of users’ particular brands, and allows people to export their presentations to a PowerPoint file for further editing or as a PDF. The startup incorporates “guardrails” using the data pipelines the startup has built over time to restrict hallucination (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.AI-generated inaccurate or misleading content).