Shows.ai, an Indian startup that makes use of AI to assist corporations shortly 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 hundreds of thousands of customers.
Shows are ubiquitous all through a business trip — whether or not a big company or a startup — to accumulate new clients, replace buyers, and talk milestones internally. But, companies nonetheless battle, spending hours cracking compelling displays, which is much more vital when focusing on purchasers or buyers.
“Folks battle 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 individuals worldwide since its public beta launch in 2023, in keeping 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 return out of stealth and begin onboarding new customers. The startup amassed 1,000,000 customers inside three months of its public beta and is at the moment making “hundreds of thousands of {dollars}” in revenue, Raghavendra mentioned.
Earlier than Shows.ai, Raghvendra based Deck App Applied sciences, which developed an app to assist individuals create enterprise content material utilizing smartphones. Nonetheless, he famous that the sooner enterprise had a “restricted diploma of success” as cellular units didn’t grow to be an instrument to create content material aside from movies.
Through the years, Raghvendra mentioned that his workforce had created IPs round constructing displays that helped Shows.ai to emerge as a aggressive participant even within the crowded area the place each startups and even huge tech corporations like Google and Microsoft try to ease presentation-building utilizing generative AI.
“As a result of we’ve got been doing this for thus 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 number of customers who are available pay us to make use of our software program. They’ve usually tried different rivals, together with no matter Google or Microsoft has,” Raghvendra asserted.
After gaining preliminary traction, the startup transitioned from a very free expertise for beta testers right into a freemium providing in early 2024. Since then, Raghvendra informed TechCrunch it has “tens of hundreds” of paying customers who pay for its service, beginning at an annual worth 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, akin to deciding which chart most closely fits a selected matter. It additionally makes use of text-to-image fashions Flux and Secure Diffusion to assist customers shortly generate pictures for use within the displays with prompts.
Shows.ai supplies 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 displays primarily based on completely different concepts, sharing and real-time sync, and multilingual help.
Equally, the startup supplies model templates to match the type of customers’ specific manufacturers. It additionally lets individuals export their displays to a PowerPoint file for additional enhancing or as a PDF.
Shows.ai particularly contains “guardrails” to guarantee enterprise clients it has a excessive bar towards 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 prohibit entry to delicate information they don’t need to be shared with different customers, such because the monetary data with the CFO that the front-line employees mustn’t entry.
The startup additionally permits internet hosting a non-public occasion of the software program. Moreover, it supplies organization-wide licenses to let staff 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 displays inside any software. It additionally plans to have an enterprise gross sales workforce.
Thus far, Raghvendra mentioned the startup has spent “zero” on its advertising and marketing. Additionally, because it owns IPs, the chief mentioned its AI patent prices are comparatively decrease and have larger profitability margins than different startups enabling displays 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.
