Gamma Acquires Lica to Build an In-House Design Research Lab

Gamma, the AI-powered presentation platform with more than 100 million users, has acquired Lica, a design startup founded in 2023 by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta and backed by the venture firm Accel. The deal brings Lica's co-founders in to lead a new design research division inside Gamma. (TechCrunch)

Lica raised $4 million in 2024 from investors including Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. The startup initially built a tool that turned screenshots and screen recordings into project presentations and videos. It later shifted focus to e-commerce, helping brands produce marketing videos that stick to their established visual brand guidelines.

Gamma and Lica share overlapping investor rosters: both are backed by Accel and South Park Commons. That shared backing likely smoothed the path to acquisition, though neither company has disclosed deal terms.

Gamma, founded at the end of 2020 and led by CEO Grant Lee, has moved quickly through funding rounds. The company raised a $12 million Series A led by Accel in August 2024, and more recently secured $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. That places Gamma among the top tier of AI application companies that have turned broad consumer adoption into real enterprise interest.

The strategic logic centers on making presentations more personalized. Gamma said Lica's research division will focus on customizing the presentation and communication styles of its AI models for different audiences and tastes. The company also indicated it wants to create what it called fluid, multimodal presentations — meaning output that blends text, images, video, and other media types — and other communication formats as a result of the acquisition.

The competitive context matters here. OpenAI acquired presentation startup NextSlide in August 2026, putting the field's most heavily funded player directly into the slide-creation market. Prezent, another AI presentation company, has raised $50 million across two rounds. The Gamma-Lica deal lands in an environment where AI-assisted presentation tools are consolidating quickly, with well-funded companies buying specialized talent and technology rather than building every feature from scratch.

What Gamma is buying is not just Lica's product but its research capability in brand-aware, style-consistent media generation. Lica's e-commerce work required solving a genuinely hard problem: producing video and visual content that follows specific brand guidelines without manual intervention. That challenge — making sure generated content respects stylistic boundaries across arbitrary brand systems — maps directly onto Gamma's goal of tailoring AI output to distinct audience preferences. A marketing video for a direct-to-consumer brand and an investor pitch deck for a Series B round both demand strict adherence to visual and tonal conventions. The underlying research problem is the same.

Gamma's 100-million-user base gives the new research division an immediate distribution channel for whatever it produces. A design research lab inside a company with that reach can iterate against real usage data at a scale that a standalone startup of Lica's size would struggle to match. The open question is whether Gamma can turn research output into product features fast enough to stay ahead of competitors with deeper pockets.

The broader pattern is a familiar one in technology. When a platform category heats up and a dominant infrastructure player enters, specialized application companies respond by acquiring talent and intellectual property to deepen their defenses. OpenAI's NextSlide acquisition puts pressure on every independent player in this space. Gamma's decision to bring Lica's co-founders in-house, rather than licensing technology or partnering at arm's length, signals an intent to build that capability as a core differentiator rather than a bolt-on feature.

In this author's view, the bet is that the next phase of AI-assisted communication tools will be won not on raw generation quality but on the ability to tailor output with precision. If brand-consistent, audience-aware presentation generation becomes the default expectation rather than a premium feature, Gamma will need the kind of research bench that Lica's team represents. The acquisition is a step in that direction. Whether it proves sufficient against a competitor that can marshal model-level advantages at scale is the question that will define this category over the next eighteen months.