Gamma has acquired Lica, an Accel-backed AI design startup, and will fold its co-founders into a new design research lab tasked with figuring out what comes after the slide deck. Lica raised $4 million in 2024 from Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global; Gamma has now crossed 100 million users and last raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Lica launched in 2023 as an app that turned screenshots and screen recordings into project presentations and marketing videos, and had spent the past two years working with e-commerce brands on on-brand video generation. Co-founders Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta will now run Gamma's research division, focused on customizing how AI models communicate across formats and audiences.
Kalyanaraman said the two teams already knew each other well — both companies are backed by Accel and South Park Commons — and that conversations between Lica and Gamma CEO Lee Grant escalated into a full deal as the market moved.
“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.”— Priyaa Kalyanaraman, Lica co-founder
Key facts
- 01Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica, with Lica's co-founders leading a new design research lab inside Gamma.
- 02Lica raised $4 million in 2024 from investors including Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global before the deal.
- 03Gamma has crossed 100 million users and previously raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation.
- 04The AI presentation category is consolidating — [OpenAI](/openai) acquired NextSlide earlier this month, while Prezent has raised $50 million across two rounds.
- 05Lica's co-founders Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta founded the startup in 2023.
The strategic logic is straightforward. Lica had the research chops on visual communication; Gamma had the distribution. Rolling one into the other is faster than either side racing the other from scratch, particularly in a category where consolidation is accelerating.
Grant framed the new research group as an attempt to redefine the medium rather than iterate on the existing product. Gamma will keep shipping presentation tools and image generation, but the lab's remit is broader: what interactive, multimodal communication looks like when the underlying models can generate any format on demand.
“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?”— Lee Grant, Gamma CEO
Mehta said the lab's early focus is personalization — tuning outputs so that a single underlying communication goal can be re-rendered for different audiences without a full rewrite. That's a research problem more than a UX one, and it maps to where frontier labs are pushing generally: models that adapt style and structure to the reader rather than the prompt.
The AI presentation category has been well-funded and is now consolidating. Prezent has raised $50 million across two rounds. Presentations.ai is also backed by Accel. And earlier this month, OpenAI acquired NextSlide, pulling a slide-generation team directly into the ChatGPT product surface.
That last deal is the one Gamma has to worry about. When the largest AI lab in the world buys a presentation startup, every independent player in the category has to decide whether to sell, specialize, or spend heavily on research to stay differentiated. Gamma is picking option three, and Lica gives it a research team on day one rather than a hiring plan.
What Gamma has not said is what ships out of the lab or when. The company declined to detail products, describing the direction only as "fluid, multimodal" communication. That's a wide surface, and it will take real releases — not just acqui-hires — to prove the research bet is paying off.
Gamma's $2.1 billion valuation was set on the strength of consumer distribution, not proprietary models. Buying Lica is an admission that distribution alone won't hold the moat once OpenAI, and whoever follows, ships native slide generation inside their flagship chat products. The interesting question is whether a 100-million-user consumer app plus a small research lab can out-invent a frontier lab in a narrow vertical. History says the vertical player usually wins on product depth and loses on model quality. Gamma is betting it can flip that.
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