Enterprise

Prezent.ai secures $20M to gamify deck presentations

Comment

Image Credits: Thomas Barwick (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

When it comes to presentation creation, PowerPoint and Keynote remain the de facto tools by incumbent advantage. PowerPoint has more than 1 billion installs and 500 million users alone, thanks to Microsoft’s longtime bundling of Office with certain Windows editions. But this hasn’t stopped startups from trying to disrupt the status quo. Besides Prezi, there’s Pitch, a deck creation suite from the founders of Wunderlist. Also slotting somewhere in the product category is Gamma, a presentation designer platform built around a card-like interface.

Convinced he had something novel to contribute, Rajat Mishra in 2021 co-founded Prezent.ai, a presentation creation tool that today closed a $20 million Series A round led by Greycroft at a valuation “north of” $100 million. In addition to hosting templates for companies to build branded presentations, Prezent.ai offers gamified learning courses to help employees improve their presenting skills.

“[I] realized that great business storytelling is essential to making your ideas shine and grow your career. Yet, millions of busy business professionals don’t have the time or training to bring their ideas to life,” Mishra told TechCrunch via email. “Alternatives like management consulting and design agencies are expensive and inaccessible to the vast majority of business professionals.”

Mishra, a former Microsoft engineering manager who spent over five years as an associate partner at McKinsey, was the general manager at consultancy Mu Sigma before becoming SVP of customer experience at Cisco. Before starting Prezent.ai, Mishra co-founded Prezentium, a firm that creates presentations on behalf of business clients.

Unlike Prezentium, Prezent.ai is self-service, offering “brand-compliant” templates that conform to corporate standards defined by the C-suite. With Prezent.ai, users can share and collaborate over decks and storylines — the service’s format is compatible with PowerPoint and Google Slides.

Prezent.ai
Prezent.ai’s online design dashboard. Image Credits: Prezent.ai

The “AI” in Prezent.ai refers to the product’s AI-powered presentation recommendations. When users log in, they’re greeted with styles that correspond to personal preferences, popular choices on the platform and so on. According to Mishra, Prezent.ai’s algorithms take into account factors like audience likes and dislikes and a company’s tribal knowledge and industry (e.g. healthcare) to suggest storylines, presentations and slides.

“We are using AI to codify empathy and context,” Mishra explained, somewhat vaguely. “Communication varies by context. Our algorithm learns to personalize communication based on empathy and context.”

As for the gamified aspects, Prezent.ai provides lessons covering four core areas: problem-solving, visual storytelling, presentation designing and presentation delivery. Each course comes with content, quizzes and exercises aimed at enhancing particular skills.

So, will Prezent.ai succeed against both the presentation design tool market’s startups and giants? Mishra makes the case that young professionals today don’t have the time to learn presentation basics without the aid of a service like Prezent.ai. Empirical data is hard to come by, but at least one survey suggests that Generation Z feels ill-prepared for workplace activities like negotiating, networking and frequent public speaking. Prezent.ai isn’t the only solution, but it’s not unreasonable to suggest products like it could instill some confidence in employees frequently tasked with presenting.

Mishra says that Prezent.ai has more than 30 paying customers with a combined hundreds of teams and “thousands” of active users.

“[The goal is to give] every person in the company sophisticated business storytelling capabilities — structured storylines inspired by management consulting, high-end designed templates, expert guides, and contextual learning modules,” Mishra said. “Working from home has changed the dynamics of business communication. The coffee-room conversations and short in-person hallway discussions have been replaced by virtual meetings and online chats.”

Other investors participating in Prezent.ai’s Series A included WestWave Capital and Emergent Ventures, both of which invested in the company’s June 2021 seed round. Prezent.ai plans to use part of the proceeds to expand its headcount from roughly 60 employees to more than 100 by the end of the year.

More TechCrunch

The UK’s data protection watchdog has closed an almost year-long investigation of Snap’s AI chatbot, My AI — saying it’s satisfied the social media firm has addressed concerns about risks…

UK data protection watchdog ends privacy probe of Snap’s GenAI chatbot, but warns industry

U.S. cell carrier Patriot Mobile experienced a data breach that included subscribers’ personal information, including full names, email addresses, home zip codes, and account PINs, TechCrunch has learned. Patriot Mobile,…

Conservative cell carrier Patriot Mobile hit by data breach

It’s been three years since Spotify acquired live audio startup Betty Labs, and yet the music streaming service isn’t leveraging the technology to its fullest potential—at least not in our…

Spotify’s ‘Listening Party’ feature falls short of expectations

Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and…

Alchemist’s latest batch puts AI to work as accelerator expands to Tokyo, Doha

“Late Pledge” allows campaign creators to continue collecting money even after the campaign has closed.

Kickstarter now lets you pledge after a campaign closes

Stack AI’s co-founders, Antoni Rosinol and Bernardo Aceituno, were PhD students at MIT wrapping up their degrees in 2022 just as large language models were becoming more mainstream. ChatGPT would…

Stack AI wants to make it easier to build AI-fueled workflows

Pinecone, the vector database startup founded by Edo Liberty, the former head of Amazon’s AI Labs, has long been at the forefront of helping businesses augment large language models (LLMs)…

Pinecone launches its serverless vector database out of preview

Young geothermal energy wells can be like budding prodigies, each brimming with potential to outshine their peers. But like people, most decline with age. In California, for example, the amount…

Special mud helps XGS Energy get more power out of geothermal wells

The market play is clear from the outset: The $449 headphones are firmly targeted at an audience that would otherwise be purchasing the Bose QC Ultra or Apple AirPods Max.

Sonos finally made some headphones

Adobe says the feature is up to the task, regardless of how complex of a background the object is set against.

Adobe brings Firefly AI-powered Generative Remove to Lightroom

All cars suffer when the mercury drops, but electric vehicles suffer more than most as heaters draw more power and batteries charge more slowly as the liquid electrolyte inside thickens.…

Porsche Ventures invests in battery startup South 8 to boost cold-weather EV performance

Scale AI has raised a $1 billion Series F round from a slew of big-name institutional and corporate investors including Amazon and Meta.

Data-labeling startup Scale AI raises $1B as valuation doubles to $13.8B

The new coalition, Tech Against Scams, will work together to find ways to fight back against the tools used by scammers and to better educate the public against financial scams.

Meta, Match, Coinbase and others team up to fight online fraud and crypto scams

It’s a wrap: European Union lawmakers have given the final approval to set up the bloc’s flagship, risk-based regulations for artificial intelligence.

EU Council gives final nod to set up risk-based regulations for AI

London-based fintech Vitesse has closed a $93 million Series C round of funding led by investment giant KKR.

Vitesse, a payments and treasury management platform for insurers, raises $93M to fuel US expansion

Zen Educate, an online marketplace that connects schools with teachers, has raised $37 million in a Series B round of funding. The raise comes amid a growing teacher shortage crisis…

Zen Educate raises $37M and acquires Aquinas Education as it tries to address the teacher shortage

“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.”

Scarlett Johansson says that OpenAI approached her to use her voice

A new self-driving truck — manufactured by Volvo and loaded with autonomous vehicle tech developed by Aurora Innovation — could be on public highways as early as this summer.  The…

Aurora and Volvo unveil self-driving truck designed for a driverless future

The European venture capital firm raised its fourth fund as fund as climate tech “comes of age.”

ETF Partners raises €285M for climate startups that will be effective quickly — not 20 years down the road

Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.

Microsoft wants to make Windows an AI operating system, launches Copilot+ PCs

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. For those who haven’t heard, the first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has been pushed back yet again to no earlier than…

TechCrunch Space: Star(side)liner

When I attended Automate in Chicago a few weeks back, multiple people thanked me for TechCrunch’s semi-regular robotics job report. It’s always edifying to get that feedback in person. While…

These 81 robotics companies are hiring

The top vehicle safety regulator in the U.S. has launched a formal probe into an April crash involving the all-electric VinFast VF8 SUV that claimed the lives of a family…

VinFast crash that killed family of four now under federal investigation

When putting a video portal in a public park in the middle of New York City, some inappropriate behavior will likely occur. The Portal, the vision of Lithuanian artist and…

NYC-Dublin real-time video portal reopens with some fixes to prevent inappropriate behavior

Longtime New York-based seed investor, Contour Venture Partners, is making progress on its latest flagship fund after lowering its target. The firm closed on $42 million, raised from 64 backers,…

Contour Venture Partners, an early investor in Datadog and Movable Ink, lowers the target for its fifth fund

Meta’s Oversight Board has now extended its scope to include the company’s newest platform, Instagram Threads, and has begun hearing cases from Threads.

Meta’s Oversight Board takes its first Threads case

The company says it’s refocusing and prioritizing fewer initiatives that will have the biggest impact on customers and add value to the business.

SeekOut, a recruiting startup last valued at $1.2 billion, lays off 30% of its workforce

The U.K.’s self-proclaimed “world-leading” regulations for self-driving cars are now official, after the Automated Vehicles (AV) Act received royal assent — the final rubber stamp any legislation must go through…

UK’s autonomous vehicle legislation becomes law, paving the way for first driverless cars by 2026

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

SoLo Funds CEO Travis Holoway: “Regulators seem driven by press releases when they should be motivated by true consumer protection and empowering equitable solutions.”

Fintech lender SoLo Funds is being sued again by the government over its lending practices