AI presentation company Gamma has acquired Lica, a small design startup backed by Accel, and will use the team to form a new design research laboratory. The price was not disclosed, making the transaction easier to assess through its talent and product direction than its financial scale.
Lica founders Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta will lead the lab. Gamma says the group will research how AI can make visual communication more personalized, multimodal and responsive to the audience receiving it.
Lica moves from startup to research team
Founded in 2023, Lica initially developed tools that converted screenshots and recordings into presentations and videos. It raised $4 million in 2024 from Accel, South Park Commons and Village Global. More recently, the startup focused on marketing videos that could follow an ecommerce brand’s visual guidelines.
Those projects sit close to Gamma’s core business of generating presentations and other visual material. Shared investors helped connect the companies, and discussions eventually led to the acquisition. The source does not describe a competitive sale process or disclose Lica’s revenue, customer count or valuation.
Kalyanaraman said Gamma has more than 100 million users. That figure is a company-side claim presented by one of the incoming leaders, not an independently audited usage measure in the report. Even so, joining a larger platform gives Lica’s founders access to a much wider testing environment than an early-stage startup could typically assemble.
A lab for personalized visual communication
Gamma’s planned research lab will explore presentations that are more fluid and multimodal, as well as systems that adapt material to a viewer’s context and taste. The stated goal is not simply to generate another slide layout, but to rethink how information changes for different audiences.
Lica’s recent work on brand-guided video provides one concrete link to that agenda. A system that can respect visual preferences while changing format could help a company reuse an idea across presentations, marketing videos and other assets. However, Gamma has not announced specific products, release dates or technical methods from the lab.
That absence matters because personalization can describe very different capabilities. It might mean selecting a visual style, reorganizing a narrative for a particular audience or generating distinct media from the same source. Until Gamma shows a product, the lab’s remit should be treated as a research direction rather than a promised feature set.
Presentation startups consolidate around design
The acquisition arrives during heavy investment in AI presentation tools. TechCrunch notes that Prezent raised $50 million, Gamma raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, and Accel also backed Presentations.ai. OpenAI acquired presentation startup NextSlide earlier in August.
Those deals suggest that visual quality and workflow are becoming strategic differentiators, even as many AI systems can produce basic slides. A model may generate words and images, but a usable presentation must maintain hierarchy, pacing, brand consistency and relevance to the people in the room.
Gamma’s decision to acquire a team and establish a lab indicates that it sees those design problems as more than a cosmetic layer. It is also a measured integration choice: Lica’s founders receive responsibility for a defined research function instead of disappearing into a general product organization.
The transaction does not demonstrate that adaptive presentations will improve communication, and no acquisition price is available to signal how Gamma valued the technology. Its immediate result is clearer: two founders with experience in presentation conversion and brand-aware video will now direct research inside a platform with a large claimed user base. The first products from that work will show whether the lab can turn an appealing design thesis into tools people actually prefer.
