Prezent, a startup empowering prospects 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 various purposes — one in every 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 know-how 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 thought [for Prezent] was, wouldn’t it’s cool if we may construct an AI platform that democratizes enterprise communication and makes everybody an incredible enterprise communicator?” Mishra informed TechCrunch in an interview.
Prezent’s platform has customers add their property and paperwork, resembling 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. Customers may also embody group abbreviations and particular terminology, in addition to extra preferences and necessities.
Prezent makes use of overtly obtainable AI fashions fine-tuned on proprietary information, together with a dataset of two million slide decks, to energy its platform, Mishra says. The startup additionally builds AI fashions for particular purposes, like recommending layouts customers ought to use for explicit decks.
For corporations on a decent deadline who need a bit of human polish, Prezent provides 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 prospects 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 purchasers in monetary companies and manufacturing and develop its operations to Europe, Japan, and Singapore.
Prezent already has a number of prospects in Europe and is seeking to develop 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 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 big effect any longer,” Mishra informed TechCrunch, including that Prezent at the moment 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, in keeping with Mishra — was led by Greycroft with participation from Zoom Ventures, Emergent Ventures, and WestWave. New traders True World Ventures (TGV), Manulife Ventures, and Alumni Ventures additionally joined the tranche.
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