Gamma acquires Accel-backed design startup Lica

Gamma is best known as a presentation-building tool. The company has raised $68 million to date, is valued at $2.1 billion, and has crossed 100 million users. This acquisition marks Gamma's attempt to push its research beyond presentations as a single format and into visual communication more broadly.

What Lica was building

Lica was founded in 2023 by Kalyanaraman and Mehta. It started as an app that converted screenshots and screen recordings into project presentations or videos. The following year, in 2024, it raised $4 million from Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. Over the roughly two years since, the company had narrowed its focus to making brand-compliant marketing videos for e-commerce sites.

Kalyanaraman explained how the two companies came together: both Lica and Gamma were backed by Accel and South Park Commons, and that shared investor base naturally connected her with Gamma CEO Lee Grant. "Our goals around making visual communication easy were remarkably aligned," Kalyanaraman told TechCrunch.

Why the deal happened now

Kalyanaraman said Lica had put its energy into frontier research — trying out new, unproven approaches — and into getting those results into users' hands. But she said that was only half the problem solved. Gamma, on the other hand, already had a distribution network reaching more than 100 million users, and that's the piece the two companies decided to combine forces around.

Grant framed the problem similarly. Presentations are Gamma's core use case today, he said, but the company needs to think ahead about how presentations will look and feel, how people will interact with them, what visual elements become possible, and how interactive they can get. Mehta said the new research team will focus on building a platform that personalizes presentations and other forms of communication for different audiences and tastes — preserving the core function of a presentation, which is delivering a big idea, while making it possible to tailor the output down to the level of the specific audience.

Gamma hasn't said exactly what products will come out of this acquisition. What it did confirm is a direction: building fluid, multimodal presentations and other communication formats together. Gamma has already been layering image-generation features onto its presentation tool, following a path similar to other design companies.

Money keeps flowing, deals keep coming

AI presentation startups have drawn heavy investor interest over the past few years.

Startup	Funding raised	Notes
Gamma	$68M ($2.1B valuation)	100M+ users; acquired Lica
Lica	$4M (2024)	Acquired by Gamma
Prezent	$50M (two rounds)	AI presentation startup
Presentations.ai	Undisclosed	Part of Accel's portfolio

Consolidation in this market is already underway. A prime example: OpenAI's acquisition of NextSlide just earlier this month. It's part of a broader pattern of larger players absorbing smaller teams to fill out their research capabilities around a single format — presentations.

Editor's take

What stands out about this deal is that Gamma didn't buy a product — it bought people and direction. Lica had a real business going, making marketing videos for e-commerce, but Gamma isn't inheriting that business. Instead, it's putting both founders in charge of a brand-new research team. The announcement doesn't say anything about what happens to Lica's existing product. This looks a lot like an acqui-hire: Gamma is buying a team that was doing frontier research to plug a gap in its own research capacity.

Watching the presentation-tools market, a pattern emerges: companies that built up distribution first and companies that built up technical depth first eventually merge. Gamma had the distribution — 100 million users. Lica had the frontier research chops. This deal puts both under one roof. OpenAI's NextSlide acquisition follows a similar logic — a big platform absorbing a small research team to prep its next feature set.

For teams building presentation or collaborative document tools domestically, there's a lesson here. The ability to grow a user base and the ability to experiment with new formats are different muscles, and it's hard for one company to be great at both from day one. A small team like Lica that stands out by focusing on a specific experiment — like automated brand-compliant video generation — becomes an attractive acquisition target for a bigger company with distribution power. Conversely, companies like Gamma with a large user base seem likely to keep buying time through this kind of acquisition rather than building out research teams from scratch.

In the coming months, Gamma's new research team may well debut its first output not as a presentation format at all, but as some other kind of communication — interactive video or short-form visual content, for instance. And expect more acquisitions of similar scale within the AI presentation category.