Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica to create a new design research lab, with Lica‘s co-founders leading the effort. Lica was founded in 2023 by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta, initially as an app for turning screenshots and recordings into presentations and videos. A year later, it raised $4 million from Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. Over the past two years, Lica shifted focus to helping e-commerce sites produce marketing videos that follow brand guidelines. Kalyanaraman said the two companies share a vision of making visual communication easy, but Lica focused on frontier research while Gamma built distribution to over 100 million users, so joining forces made sense given the pace of change in the industry.

Gamma will continue focusing on presentations but has already added image generation. Lee Grant, Gamma‘s CEO, said the new research division will explore how presentations look, feel, and engage audiences in the future, and what visuals and interactivity are possible. Mehta said the division will work on customizing AI models’ presentation and communication styles for different audiences and tastes, with the goal of letting users get a strong output and then edit it for different audiences. Gamma did not disclose specific products from the acquisition, but wants to create fluid, multimodal presentations and other communication modalities.

The deal comes amid significant investor interest in AI presentation startups. Prezent raised $50 million in two rounds, Gamma raised $68 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, and Presentations.ai is also backed by Accel. Consolidation is beginning as well: OpenAI acquired NextSlide earlier this month.