Prezent raises $30 million to acquire AI services firms — starting with founder’s other company

Praisea startup offering businesses an AI-powered presentation builder said today it has raised $30 million in funding led by Multiplier Capital, Greycroft and Nomura Strategic Ventures, with participation from existing investors such as Emergent Ventures, WestWave Capital and Alumni Ventures.

Now valued at $400 million, the Los Altos, California-based startup has raised more than $74 million to date. It plans to use the new capital largely for acquisitions.

The company also made its first acquisition by acquiring Prezentium, a services-based presentation company active in the life sciences vertical. In an unusual arrangement, Prezent founder Rahul Mishra was one of the co-founders of Prezentium. Mishra said he has been the non-operational president of Prezentium since the inception of his new startup. Both startups already have an existing relationship, as Prezent uses Prezentium as a go-to-market partner. The acquisition essentially brings Mishra’s two businesses under one roof, allowing Prezent to leverage Prezentium’s customer base to offer its own AI suite to more customers.

There are plenty of companies trying to create AI-powered presentation building tools, including Presentations.ai, Lica, Gamma and Chronicle. It is striking that all these companies have Accel as a financier. While most focus on consumers and small business users, Prezent wants to stick to a business strategy aimed at larger companies. Previously, the company stated that it wants to expand its offering into several verticals, including finance and manufacturing. However, Mishra noted that for now the company wants to focus on serving customers in the life sciences and technology industries.

“There are lots of tools that try to make presentations beautiful. We want to provide the best tools for business communication. I think presentation is one of the frontiers in companies that are not yet automated. We want to help data scientists and designers communicate effectively with this automation,” Mishra told TechCrunch.

Mishra, who previously worked at McKinsey, said the company takes a specialized approach to training AI models for presentations for each specific industry.

Prezent places a presentation engineer, who is familiar with the industry and the startup’s own offerings, in enterprises to help different people within the company get used to building presentations with AI tools.

“The reality of AI in enterprises is that while AI can do many things, it cannot teach people anything [how] to use AI. Therefore, we want to place presentation engineers in companies to help our customers adopt the product faster,” said Mishra.

AI startups are looking to acquire service companies to capitalize on existing customer bases and also provide better customization to enterprise customers. Digital avatar startup D-ID acquired Berlin-based video startup Simpleshow, and Google-backed legal tech startup Lawhive has acquired a UK-based law firm. With these acquisitions, AI startups aim to combine their AI tools with the existing domain expertise and customer service capabilities of service companies.

Prezent wants to build more partnerships and acquire suitable companies in sectors such as executive communications coaching, medical writing and communications consultancies.

Mark Terbeek, a partner at Greycroft who has invested in Prezent in multiple rounds, said the venture capital firm is keen to target areas where companies have historically used expensive agencies to fill a need, and that AI tools are now available that attempt to perform the same tasks.

“We felt like Rajat and Prezent were focusing hard on solving specific customer needs in business communications. Additionally, we saw software rapidly evolving to adapt to end-user workflows and help them save time,” he told TechCrunch during a call.

In the future, Prezent wants to better personalize its product, so that the AI ​​tool learns the style of each individual in the organization. It also wants to add multimodality capabilities to deck creations, allowing users to use text, voice or video as input to create presentations. Like Synthesia and D-ID, Prezent also wants to add digital avatars to presentations.