Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica, TechCrunch has learned. The acquisition is intended to form a design research division within Gamma, which will be led by Lica’s co-founders.
Background on Lica
Lica was founded in 2023 by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta. The company began with an app that converted screenshots and recordings into project presentations and videos. In 2024, Lica raised $4 million from investors including Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. In recent years it focused on working with e-commerce platforms to produce marketing videos that conform to brand guidelines.
Why the acquisition happened
Kalyanaraman said Lica wanted to build AI models around communication methods such as video and design. The founders were already familiar with Gamma’s leadership because both companies count Accel and South Park Commons among their backers. Those conversations ultimately led to the acquisition.
Kalyanaraman told TechCrunch: “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.”
Gamma’s strategy and the research division’s remit
Gamma will continue to concentrate on helping people build presentations, but like other design companies it has begun offering image generation. The company says the new research division will explore different formats of communication.
Lee Grant, Gamma’s CEO, commented: “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? What visuals are possible? How interactive are they? These [questions] all require us to think deeply about the core responsibility of communication. This is why we’re excited to invest in this area, because we don’t think anybody else is thinking at that level.”
Lica co-founder Purvanshi Mehta said the research team will work on customizing presentation and communication styles of AI models for different audiences and tastes. “The point of the presentation is to communicate a large goal. We are thinking about building a platform where these two 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,” she said.
Products and market context
Gamma did not disclose specific products it plans to develop following the acquisition, only that it aims to create fluid, multimodal presentations and other communication modalities.
AI presentation startups have attracted substantial investor attention in recent years. Examples include Prezent, which raised $50 million across two rounds; Gamma, which raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation; and Presentations.ai, which was also backed by Accel. The category has begun to consolidate as well: earlier this month, OpenAI acquired NextSlide.
Implications
The integration of Lica into Gamma’s research efforts signals both cooperation among startups and heightened interest in visual, multimodal communication solutions. The companies have not disclosed a detailed product timeline or integration plan.
