Gamma has acquired design startup Lica and will place the startup’s co-founders at the head of a newly created research division, TechCrunch has learned. The deal gives Gamma both a research nucleus and a team that has already built product experience around automated visual communication.
Lica launched in 2023 as an app that converted screenshots and recordings into presentations and videos. The company raised $4 million a year later from investors that include Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. In recent months Lica shifted toward work for e-commerce brands, producing marketing videos that follow strict brand guidelines.
Priyaa Kalyanaraman, Lica’s co-founder, described overlapping ambitions between the two companies and said those conversations led to the acquisition. “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 told TechCrunch.
Gamma’s CEO Lee Grant framed the purchase as a step toward rethinking what presentations can be. “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,” Grant said.
Co-founder Purvanshi Mehta said the new group will work on tailoring AI models so presentations and other communications fit 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.
Gamma has previously expanded beyond slide-building, adding image generation and other creative tools. The company did not disclose product plans tied to this acquisition, but it said the research arm will explore fluid, multimodal presentations and other communication formats.
The move comes amid a wave of investor attention and consolidation in AI presentation tools. Prezent has raised $50 million across two rounds, Gamma has raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, and Presentations.ai counts Accel among its backers. OpenAI also acquired NextSlide earlier this month, underscoring that startups and larger platforms are racing to combine research depth with broad distribution.
For Gamma, the acquisition secures talent and research capability at a moment when presentation software is shifting toward generative and multimodal output. For rivals and users, it signals a market moving toward vertically integrated offerings that pair model development with product reach. Expect Gamma to fold Lica’s team and technology into experiments that test new formats for visual communication.
