Displays.ai, an Indian startup that makes use of AI to assist corporations rapidly 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.
Displays are ubiquitous all through a business trip — whether or not a big company or a startup — to amass new clients, replace traders, and talk milestones internally. But, companies nonetheless wrestle, spending hours cracking compelling displays, which is much more essential when focusing on purchasers or traders.
“Individuals wrestle to take the primary draft of a presentation,” stated 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 folks worldwide since its public beta launch in 2023, based on the corporate. “We wish to be the ChatGPT for presentation. Take into consideration making a presentation utilizing AI, utilizing that very same assemble that ChatGPT operates beneath,” Raghavendra advised TechCrunch.
Based in 2019, Displays.ai noticed ChatGPT’s emergence in late 2022 because the second to come back out of stealth and begin onboarding new customers. The startup amassed one million customers inside three months of its public beta and is at the moment making “hundreds of thousands of {dollars}” in revenue, Raghavendra stated.
Earlier than Displays.ai, Raghvendra based Deck App Applied sciences, which developed an app to assist folks create enterprise content material utilizing smartphones. Nonetheless, he famous that the sooner enterprise had a “restricted diploma of success” as cell gadgets didn’t develop into an instrument to create content material apart from movies.
Through the years, Raghvendra stated that his group had created IPs round constructing displays that helped Displays.ai to emerge as a aggressive participant even within the crowded house the place each startups and even huge tech corporations like Google and Microsoft are attempting to ease presentation-building utilizing generative AI.
“As a result of we now have 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 quite a lot of customers who are available in pay us to make use of our software program. They’ve sometimes tried different opponents, together with no matter Google or Microsoft has,” Raghvendra asserted.
After gaining preliminary traction, the startup transitioned from a totally free expertise for beta testers right into a freemium providing in early 2024. Since then, Raghvendra advised TechCrunch it has “tens of hundreds” of paying customers who pay for its service, beginning at an annual value 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, equivalent to deciding which chart most closely fits a specific subject. It additionally makes use of text-to-image fashions Flux and Secure Diffusion to assist customers rapidly generate photographs for use within the displays with prompts.
Displays.ai offers instruments together with theme palettes and presentation types to generate decks primarily based on consumer preferences. It additionally presents 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 offers model templates to match the fashion of customers’ explicit manufacturers. It additionally lets folks export their displays to a PowerPoint file for additional modifying or as a PDF.
Displays.ai particularly consists of “guardrails” to guarantee enterprise clients it has a excessive bar in opposition to the competitors. These guardrails, Raghvendra stated, are constructed utilizing the information 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 knowledge they don’t wish to be shared with different customers, such because the monetary info with the CFO that the front-line workers shouldn’t entry.
The startup additionally permits internet hosting a non-public occasion of the software program. Moreover, it offers organization-wide licenses to let workers 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 group.
To this point, Raghvendra stated the startup has spent “zero” on its advertising and marketing. Additionally, because it owns IPs, the chief stated 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.Ok., Germany, Australia, Canada, and the Center East amongst its key markets.
The seed spherical included participation from discovered Indian entrepreneurs together with Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED’s Kunal Shah, Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubhootham, and RedBus’ Phanindra Sama, amongst others.
