Gamma just made its first acquisition, picking up Lica — a two-year-old startup that started by turning screenshots into polished videos before pivoting to AI-generated marketing content for e-commerce brands. The deal, confirmed exclusively to TechCrunch, puts Lica co-founders Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta in charge of a new design research division inside Gamma.
The math makes sense on paper. Gamma has the distribution — CEO Grant Lee says the platform has crossed 100 million users. Lica has the research chops and a $4 million seed round from Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global to show for it. Both companies share investors, which is how the founders got to know each other in the first place. “Given how fast things are moving, we decided to join forces,” Kalyanaraman said.
What’s actually being built is still vague. Gamma won’t say which products will come out of the new division, only that it wants to push presentations beyond static slides into something more fluid, multimodal, and interactive. Mehta framed it as personalization: the same underlying content rendered differently depending on who’s watching. Think of a pitch deck that automatically adjusts its visual language for a boardroom versus a customer demo.
This is the second consolidation move in the AI presentation space in a matter of weeks. OpenAI quietly bought NextSlide earlier this month, which suggests the category is maturing faster than anyone expected. Gamma raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, Prezent pulled in $50 million across two rounds, and Presentations.ai has Accel’s backing too. When startups in a space start buying each other instead of just competing, it usually means the land grab is entering a new phase — one where research depth, not just user counts, determines who survives the next two years.
