Gamma, the AI-powered presentation startup, has acquired Lica, a design startup backed by venture firm Accel, with plans to establish a dedicated design research division. Lica's two co-founders will take the helm of that new internal unit.

Lica was originally built as a tool capable of converting screenshots and screen recordings into polished project presentations and short videos. The company was founded in 2023 by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta, and by the following year had secured $4 million in funding from a group of investors that included Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. In the period since, Lica shifted its focus toward serving e-commerce businesses, helping them produce marketing videos that remain consistent with their established brand guidelines.

Kalyanaraman explained that Lica's broader ambition had always been to develop AI models centered on communication formats, particularly video and visual design. The path to acquisition was partly shaped by existing relationships - both Lica and Gamma share common investors in Accel and South Park Commons, which gave the founders early familiarity with Gamma's chief executive, Grant Lee. Those professional ties gradually evolved into acquisition discussions.

"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 said.

Expanding Beyond Presentations

Gamma's core product will remain focused on helping users build presentations, but the company has already begun branching out. Like many other design-oriented technology firms, it has introduced image generation capabilities. With the addition of the new research division, Gamma says it intends to explore a broader range of communication formats.

Lee outlined the company's thinking in terms of how presentations themselves might evolve over time, pointing to interactivity, visual possibilities, and the fundamental nature of communication as areas the research team will examine.

"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 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," Lee said.

Personalization at the Core of the Research Agenda

Mehta described the research division's mandate as one centered on tailoring both presentation and communication styles within AI models to suit different audiences and individual preferences. The goal, she said, is to build a platform capable of generating highly relevant outputs that can then be refined for specific viewers or contexts.

"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," Mehta said.

Gamma has not disclosed specific products it intends to develop as a direct result of the acquisition. However, the company indicated that its broader aim is to create fluid, multimodal presentations and to expand into other forms of communication entirely.

A Crowded and Consolidating Market

The AI presentation software sector has attracted substantial investor interest and capital over the past several years. Prezent has raised $50 million across two funding rounds, while Gamma itself secured $68 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion. Other players in the space, including Presentations.ai, have also drawn backing from Accel, underscoring the venture firm's strong conviction in this category.

The acquisition of Lica is part of a broader trend of consolidation beginning to take shape within the AI presentation industry. Earlier this month, OpenAI made its own move in this direction by acquiring NextSlide, signaling that larger technology players are now taking an active interest in owning a stake in how AI-driven communication tools develop. With multiple well-funded startups operating in the same space and major companies beginning to make acquisitions, the competitive dynamics of the market appear to be shifting.

For Gamma, the Lica deal represents both a talent acquisition and a strategic investment in longer-term research capabilities. By bringing in a team with a background in frontier AI research applied to visual communication, the company is positioning itself to influence not just how presentations are made today, but how the concept of a presentation might be redefined in the years ahead.