The AI presentation company behind more than 100 million users is folding Lica's founders into a new lab focused on how AI models design and communicate — the latest deal in a fast-consolidating AI presentation market.
2026-08-25 · by Moe Ameen
On August 25, 2026, AI presentation company Gamma said it had acquired Lica, an Accel-backed design startup, to build out its own design research lab. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Lica's two co-founders, Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta, are joining Gamma to lead the new effort, which Gamma frames as work on how AI models design, personalize, and communicate for different audiences.
Lica was founded in 2023 and raised about $4 million in 2024 from Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. The product started as a tool that turned screenshots and recordings into presentations and videos, then narrowed toward generating on-brand marketing videos for e-commerce. Kalyanaraman has said Lica's ambition was to build AI models around communication methods like video and design; the founders already knew Gamma CEO Grant Lee, as both companies share backers.
Gamma is one of the larger AI presentation players. In November 2025 it said it had crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, and the company reports more than 100 million users. Lee has framed presentations as a starting point rather than the ceiling — the question being how to expand what a "presentation" can look and feel like — and the new lab is aimed at customizing AI output for different audiences and tastes.
The deal lands amid visible consolidation in AI-generated presentations and visual communication. Earlier in August 2026, OpenAI absorbed the team behind presentation startup NextSlide into ChatGPT, and incumbents including Microsoft (Copilot in PowerPoint) and Google (Gemini in Slides) are pushing into the same lane. Treat any unstated financials here as undisclosed rather than inferred.
The useful read on this deal isn't which slide tool wins — it's that decks and marketing content are collapsing into one generation step, and generation was never the hard part of publishing. Whatever you build in Gamma (or its Lica-powered successor), the output is one artifact that reaches whoever opens it. [Kompozy](/) is the layer that turns that material into a week of published posts. Paste the deck's outline, its strongest lines, or the source notes you fed the tool, and Kompozy fans it into roughly 25–35 assets across 18 formats: a brand-exact [Carousel Post](/glossary/hyperframes) that mirrors the deck slide-for-slide, a [Persona Short](/glossary/persona-shorts) where a face-locked avatar narrates the core argument, quote graphics pulled from the best lines, plus a blog post and an email newsletter.
The two things a presentation tool still doesn't do are the two things Kompozy exists for. Consistency: a [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief) and an AI Influencer persona pool with Gemini face-lock keep one voice and one recognizable presenter across every asset, not just inside one file. Distribution: [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) captions, resizes per platform, and schedules the whole set across the eight social platforms plus blog and email, each asset clearing a per-post review gate first. Gamma and Lica are getting better at making the artifact; Kompozy is how the artifact becomes published content.
Gamma acquired Lica, an Accel-backed design startup, on August 25, 2026. Terms were not disclosed. Lica's co-founders, Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta, are joining Gamma to lead a new design research lab focused on how AI models design and communicate for different audiences.
Gamma is an AI-powered tool that generates presentations, documents, and simple websites from text prompts, positioning itself as a new medium for presenting ideas rather than a traditional slide builder. As of late 2025 it reported crossing $100 million in ARR and a $2.1 billion valuation, and it says it has more than 100 million users.
Lica was a design startup founded in 2023 that raised about $4 million in 2024 from Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. It began by turning screenshots and recordings into presentations and videos, then focused on generating on-brand marketing videos for e-commerce.
AI deck tools are expanding into video and marketing content, but they still generate a single artifact rather than a full multi-platform content set. To turn a Gamma deck or a Lica-style clip into captioned, on-brand posts scheduled across platforms, you still need a publishing layer like Kompozy.