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 — one among which is producing decks for enterprise displays, because it seems. Off-the-shelf fashions are usually not excellent 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 concept [for Prezent] was, wouldn’t or not it’s cool if we may construct an AI platform that democratizes enterprise communication and makes everybody an ideal enterprise communicator?” Mishra instructed TechCrunch in an interview.
Prezent’s platform has customers add their belongings and paperwork, corresponding to Excel information, PDFs, and hyperlinks, and provides Prezent’s AI assistant, referred to as Astrid, context concerning the firm for which they’re making a presentation. Users may embrace group abbreviations and particular terminology, in addition to further preferences and necessities.
Prezent makes use of overtly out there 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 decent deadline who need somewhat human polish, Prezent gives an expedited service that turns draft paperwork into what the corporate describes as “professional-grade” displays. The service employs a mixture 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 Series A, will assist Prezent go after potential shoppers in monetary providers and manufacturing and develop its operations to Europe, Japan, and Singapore.
Prezent already has a number of clients in Europe and is seeking to develop into Southeast Asia in Q2 of this yr. Last yr, the corporate generated over $10 million in annual recurring income, Mishra instructed TechCrunch.
Prezent additionally plans to launch APIs to permit builders to create displays instantly from chatbots, apps, search engines like google, and extra utilizing its fashions.
“DeepSeek not too long ago confirmed us that AI corporations don’t want these huge funding rounds to make a huge impact any longer,” Mishra instructed TechCrunch, including that Prezent presently has “near 200” staff, 75% of whom work remotely and are based mostly in India.
Prezent’s newest funding — which values Prezent at “nicely over” $100 million, based on Mishra — was led by Greycroft with participation from Zoom Ventures, Emergent Ventures, and WestWave. New buyers True Global Ventures (TGV), Manulife Ventures, and Alumni Ventures additionally joined the tranche.
