Gamma acquires Accel-backed design startup Lica to build a research lab

Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica in a bid to build out its own design research lab, with Lica’s co-founders leading the effort. Lica started as an app that turned screenshots and recordings into project presentations and videos. Founded by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta in 2023, the company raised $4 million a year later from investors including Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global, and over the past couple of years had focused on helping e-commerce sites create marketing videos that adhere to brand guidelines.

Kalyanaraman said Lica wanted to build AI models around communication methods, including video and design, and that the founders were already familiar with Gamma CEO Grant Lee since both companies are backed by Accel and South Park Commons — conversations that 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 — it has also started offering image generation — and says it now wants to explore different formats of communication through the new research division. Lee said the company sees deep questions about how presentations look, feel, and become interactive as central to a broader “core responsibility of communication” that it believes no one else is tackling at the same level. Mehta said the new division would work on customizing the presentation and communication styles of AI models for different audiences and tastes, describing a platform where those 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.”

Gamma didn’t reveal what products it plans to build from the acquisition but said it wants to create fluid, multimodal presentations and other communication formats.

AI presentation startups have drawn heavy investor attention and money in recent years: Prezent raised $50 million across two rounds, Gamma itself raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, and Presentations.ai was also backed by Accel. The category is also starting to consolidate — earlier this month, OpenAI acquired NextSlide.

Why it matters

The deal is the latest sign of consolidation among AI presentation and design startups, as Gamma — backed by the same investors as Lica — bets that pairing distribution scale with frontier research on visual communication can outpace rivals like Prezent and Presentations.ai.