Prezent, a startup empowering clients to construct slide decks utilizing generative AI, has raised $20 million because it additional develops and refines its AI fashions for various use instances and expands into new markets.
AI has many alternative functions — certainly one of which is producing decks for enterprise displays, because it seems. Off-the-shelf fashions are typically not superb at this as a result of they don’t perceive industry-specific language and jargon. That’s the place Prezent’s expertise is available in.
Los Altos-based Prezent, which has a subsidiary in Bengaluru, was based in 2021 by Rajat Mishra, who beforehand labored at corporations together with Cisco and McKinsey. Mishra says he struggled to beat stuttering and speech impediments at a younger age, which drove his curiosity in communication tech.
“The idea [for Prezent] was, wouldn’t it be cool if we could build an AI platform that democratizes business communication and makes everyone a great business communicator?” Mishra informed TechCrunch in an interview.
Prezent’s platform has customers add their property and paperwork, equivalent to Excel information, PDFs, and hyperlinks, and provides Prezent’s AI assistant, known as Astrid, context in regards to the firm for which they’re making a presentation. Customers also can embrace group abbreviations and particular terminology, in addition to further preferences and necessities.
Prezent makes use of brazenly accessible AI fashions fine-tuned on proprietary knowledge, together with a dataset of two million slide decks, to energy its platform, Mishra says. The startup additionally builds AI fashions for particular functions, like recommending layouts customers ought to use for specific decks.
For corporations on a good deadline who need a little bit human polish, Prezent gives an expedited service that turns draft paperwork into what the corporate describes as “professional-grade” displays. The service employs a mix of AI and human reviewers, together with consultants and designers, to in a single day spruced-up, finalized drafts.
Prezent claims to serve round 150 Fortune 2000 corporations, and targets clients within the biopharma and tech industries. Mishra says that the brand new funding, an all-equity funding and an extension of Prezent’s April 2022 Sequence A, will assist Prezent go after potential purchasers in monetary companies and manufacturing and increase its operations to Europe, Japan, and Singapore.
Prezent already has a number of clients in Europe and is seeking to increase into Southeast Asia in Q2 of this 12 months. Final 12 months, the corporate generated over $10 million in annual recurring income, Mishra informed TechCrunch.
Prezent additionally plans to launch APIs to permit builders to create displays immediately from chatbots, apps, serps, and extra utilizing its fashions.
“DeepSeek recently showed us that AI companies don’t need these massive funding rounds to make a big impact any longer,” Mishra informed TechCrunch, including that Prezent presently has “close to 200” staff, 75% of whom work remotely and are primarily based in India.
Prezent’s newest funding — which values Prezent at “well over” $100 million, in line with Mishra — was led by Greycroft with participation from Zoom Ventures, Emergent Ventures, and WestWave. New buyers True World Ventures (TGV), Manulife Ventures, and Alumni Ventures additionally joined the tranche.
