Displays.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 tens of millions of customers.
Displays are ubiquitous all through a work trip — whether or not a big company or a startup — to accumulate new clients, replace buyers, and talk milestones internally. But, companies nonetheless wrestle, spending hours cracking compelling displays, which is much more essential when focusing on shoppers or buyers.
“People struggle to take the first 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 response to the corporate. “We want to be the ChatGPT for presentation. Think about making a presentation using AI, using that same construct that ChatGPT operates under,” Raghavendra advised TechCrunch.
Based in 2019, Displays.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 “millions of dollars” in revenue, Raghavendra mentioned.
Earlier than Displays.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 “limited degree of success” as cellular units didn’t grow to be an instrument to create content material apart from movies.
Through the years, Raghvendra mentioned that his staff had created IPs round constructing displays that helped Displays.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 are attempting to ease presentation-building utilizing generative AI.
“Because we have been doing this for so many years, I’m fairly confident that we are far ahead of anybody else, and the proof of the pudding for us is that a lot of users who come in pay us to use our software. They have typically tried other competitors, including whatever 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 advised TechCrunch it has “tens of thousands” of paying customers who pay for its service, beginning at an annual worth of $200 per consumer within the U.S., with totally 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 specific matter. It additionally makes use of text-to-image fashions Flux and Steady Diffusion to assist customers shortly generate photos for use within the displays with prompts.
Displays.ai gives instruments together with theme palettes and presentation kinds to generate decks primarily based on consumer preferences. It additionally gives options together with an AI-powered design assistant to create displays primarily based on totally different concepts, sharing and real-time sync, and multilingual help.
Equally, the startup gives model templates to match the model of customers’ specific manufacturers. It additionally lets individuals export their displays to a PowerPoint file for additional modifying or as a PDF.
Displays.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 personal occasion of the software program. Moreover, it gives organization-wide licenses to let staff collaborate on a specific presentation.
Raghvendra advised TechCrunch the startup plans to make use of the seed funding to launch a devoted presentation agent to create displays inside any utility. It additionally plans to have an enterprise gross sales staff.
To this point, Raghvendra mentioned the startup has spent “zero” on its advertising. Additionally, because it owns IPs, the chief mentioned its AI patent prices are comparatively decrease and have greater 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.Okay., 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.
