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

Prezent, a startup that offers an AI-powered presentation builder to enterprises, said today that it has raised $30 million in funding led by Multiplier Capital, Greycroft, and Nomura Strategic Ventures, with participation from existing investors like Emergent Ventures, WestWave Capital, and Alumni Ventures.

The Los Altos, California, startup, which is now valued at $400 million, has raised over $74 million to date. It plans to use the new capital largely for acquisitions.

The company has also made its first acquisition, buying Prezentium, founded by Deepti Juturu, a services-led presentation company that operates in the life sciences vertical. In an unusual arrangement, Prezent founder Rajat Mishra was one of the co-founders of Prezentium. Mishra said that since the beginning of his new startup, he has been the non-operating president of Prezentium. Both startups already have an existing relationship, as Prezent uses Prezentium as a go-to-market partner. The acquisition essentially brings Mishra’s two ventures under one roof, allowing Prezent to use Prezentium’s client 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. Notably, all these companies have Accel as a backer. While most of them focus on consumers and small business users, Prezent wants to stick to an enterprise strategy, targeting larger corporations. Previously, the company stated that it wants to expand its offerings to different verticals, including finance and manufacturing. However, Mishra noted that for now, the company wants to focus on serving clients in the life sciences and tech industries.

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

Mishra, who previously worked at McKinsey, said that the company is taking 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 enterprise is that while AI can do many things, it can’t teach people [how] to use AI. That is why we want to place presentation engineers in companies to help our customers adopt the product faster,” Mishra said.

AI startups are looking to acquire services companies to take advantage of existing customer bases and also provide better customization to enterprise clients. Digital avatar startup D-ID acquired Berlin-based video startup Simpleshow, and Google-backed legal tech startup Lawhive acquired a U.K.-based law firm. With these acquisitions, AI startups want to combine their AI tools with the existing domain expertise and client service capabilities of services firms.

Prezent wants to build more partnerships and acquire suitable companies in sectors like executive communication coaching, medical writing, and consulting firms in the communication area.

Mark Terbeek, a partner at Greycroft who has invested in multiple rounds in Prezent, said that the venture firm likes to find the areas where businesses have used costly agencies in the past to fulfill a need, and now there are AI tools available trying to do the same tasks.

“We felt that Rajat and Prezent were concentrating hard on solving specific customer needs of business communications. Plus, we saw software evolve quickly to adjust to the workflows of end users and help them save time,” he told TechCrunch over a call.

Going forward, Prezent wants to add better personalization to its product so 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 make presentations. Like Synthesia and D-ID, Prezent wants to add digital avatars to presentations, too.