Presentations.ai, an Indian startup that leverages artificial intelligence to help companies quickly generate presentation decks, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Accel. The funding will be used to scale its software, which has emerged from beta and has already gained significant traction with over 5 million users worldwide.

The Bengaluru-based startup has identified a significant pain point in the business world, where companies spend hours crafting compelling presentations to acquire new customers, update investors, and communicate milestones internally. Presentations.ai's AI-powered platform aims to make this process easier and more efficient, allowing users to create presentations quickly and effortlessly.

According to Sumanth Raghavendra, co-founder and CEO of Presentations.ai, the startup wants to be the "ChatGPT for presentation," using a similar construct to generate presentations using AI. Founded in 2019, Presentations.ai saw the emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022 as the moment to come out of stealth and start onboarding new users. The startup amassed a million users within three months of its public beta and is currently making "millions of dollars" in profit, Raghavendra said.

Before Presentations.ai, Raghvendra founded Deck App Technologies, which developed an app to help people create business content using smartphones. However, he noted that the earlier venture had a "limited degree of success" as mobile devices did not become an instrument to create content other than videos. Over the years, Raghvendra said that his team had created IPs around building presentations that helped Presentations.ai to emerge as a competitive player even in the crowded space where both startups and big tech companies like Google and Microsoft are trying to ease presentation-building using generative AI.

After gaining initial traction, the startup transitioned from a completely free experience for beta testers into a freemium offering in early 2024. Since then, Raghvendra told TechCrunch it has "tens of thousands" of paying users who pay for its service, starting at an annual price of $200 per user in the U.S., with different tiers and localized pricing across markets. The startup utilizes "frontier" LLMs along with its own small language models created for specific tasks, such as deciding which chart best fits a particular topic.

Presentations.ai provides tools including theme palettes and presentation styles to generate decks based on user preferences. It also offers features including an AI-powered design assistant to create presentations based on different ideas, sharing and real-time sync, and multilingual support. The startup also provides brand templates to match the style of users' particular brands, and lets people export their presentations to a PowerPoint file for further editing or as a PDF.

Presentations.ai specifically includes "guardrails" to assure enterprise customers it has a high bar against the competition. These guardrails, Raghvendra said, are built using the data pipelines the startup has built over time to restrict hallucination, the colloquial term of AI-generated inaccurate or misleading content. The platform also lets enterprises restrict access to sensitive data they do not want to be shared with other users, such as financial information with the CFO that the front-line staff should not access.

The startup also allows hosting a private instance of the software and provides organization-wide licenses to let employees collaborate on a particular presentation. Raghvendra told TechCrunch the startup plans to use the seed funding to launch a dedicated presentation agent to create presentations within any application. It also plans to have an enterprise sales team.

So far, Raghvendra said the startup has spent "zero" on its marketing. Also, since it owns IPs, the executive said its AI patent costs are relatively lower and have higher profitability margins than other startups enabling presentations using AI. The startup gets 20% of its revenues from the U.S. followed by India, and also counts the U.K., Germany, Australia, Canada, and the Middle East among its key markets.

The seed round included participation from learned Indian entrepreneurs including Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED's Kunal Shah, Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubhootham, and RedBus' Phanindra Sama, among others. With this funding, Presentations.ai is poised to revolutionize the way companies create presentations, making it faster, easier, and more efficient than ever before.