Shows.ai, an Indian startup that makes use of AI to assist firms rapidly generate presentation decks, has raised $3 million in a seed spherical led by Accel to scale its software program that has emerged from beta after amassing tens of millions of customers.
Shows are ubiquitous all through a work trip — whether or not a big company or a startup — to amass new clients, replace traders, and talk milestones internally. But, companies nonetheless wrestle, spending hours cracking compelling shows, which is much more important when concentrating on purchasers or traders.
“Individuals wrestle to take the primary draft of a presentation,” mentioned Sumanth Raghavendra, co-founder and CEO of Presenations.ai, in an unique interview.
The Bengaluru-based startup has made that simpler with its AI-powered platform, utilized by over 5 million folks worldwide since its public beta launch in 2023, in line with the corporate. “We need to be the ChatGPT for presentation. Take into consideration making a presentation utilizing AI, utilizing that very same assemble that ChatGPT operates below,” Raghavendra informed TechCrunch.
Based in 2019, Shows.ai noticed ChatGPT’s emergence in late 2022 because the second to come back out of stealth and begin onboarding new customers. The startup amassed one million customers inside three months of its public beta and is at the moment making “tens of millions of {dollars}” in revenue, Raghavendra mentioned.
Earlier than Shows.ai, Raghvendra based Deck App Applied sciences, which developed an app to assist folks create enterprise content material utilizing smartphones. Nevertheless, he famous that the sooner enterprise had a “restricted diploma of success” as cell gadgets didn’t turn into an instrument to create content material apart from movies.
Over time, Raghvendra mentioned that his staff had created IPs round constructing shows that helped Shows.ai to emerge as a aggressive participant even within the crowded house the place each startups and even huge tech firms like Google and Microsoft are attempting to ease presentation-building utilizing generative AI.
“As a result of now we have been doing this for therefore a few years, I’m pretty assured that we’re far forward of anyone else, and the proof of the pudding for us is that a variety of customers who are available pay us to make use of our software program. They’ve usually tried different opponents, together with no matter Google or Microsoft has,” Raghvendra asserted.
After gaining preliminary traction, the startup transitioned from a totally free expertise for beta testers right into a freemium providing in early 2024. Since then, Raghvendra informed TechCrunch it has “tens of 1000’s” of paying customers who pay for its service, beginning at an annual value of $200 per consumer within the U.S., with completely different tiers and localized pricing throughout markets.
The startup makes use of “frontier” LLMs together with its personal small language fashions created for particular duties, resembling deciding which chart most closely fits a selected subject. It additionally makes use of text-to-image fashions Flux and Secure Diffusion to assist customers rapidly generate pictures for use within the shows with prompts.
Shows.ai gives instruments together with theme palettes and presentation types to generate decks primarily based on consumer preferences. It additionally provides options together with an AI-powered design assistant to create shows primarily based on completely different concepts, sharing and real-time sync, and multilingual assist.
Equally, the startup gives model templates to match the model of customers’ explicit manufacturers. It additionally lets folks export their shows to a PowerPoint file for additional modifying or as a PDF.
Shows.ai particularly consists of “guardrails” to guarantee enterprise clients it has a excessive bar in opposition to the competitors. These guardrails, Raghvendra mentioned, are constructed utilizing the info pipelines the startup has constructed over time to limit hallucination, the colloquial time period of AI-generated inaccurate or deceptive content material. The platform additionally lets enterprises limit entry to delicate knowledge they don’t need to be shared with different customers, such because the monetary info with the CFO that the front-line employees mustn’t entry.
The startup additionally permits internet hosting a personal occasion of the software program. Moreover, it gives organization-wide licenses to let workers collaborate on a selected presentation.
Raghvendra informed TechCrunch the startup plans to make use of the seed funding to launch a devoted presentation agent to create shows inside any software. It additionally plans to have an enterprise gross sales staff.
To date, Raghvendra mentioned the startup has spent “zero” on its advertising. Additionally, because it owns IPs, the chief mentioned its AI patent prices are comparatively decrease and have greater profitability margins than different startups enabling shows utilizing AI.
The startup will get 20% of its revenues from the U.S. adopted by India. It additionally counts the U.Ok., Germany, Australia, Canada, and the Center East amongst its key markets.
The seed spherical included participation from realized Indian entrepreneurs together with Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED’s Kunal Shah, Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubhootham, and RedBus’ Phanindra Sama, amongst others.
