Prezent raises $30M to acquire AI services companies — starting with the founder’s other company

The presenta startup that offers an AI-powered presentation creation tool for enterprises, 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 and West Wave Capital. and Alumni Ventures.

The Los Altos, Calif., startup, now valued at $400 million, has raised money 74 million dollars yet. It plans to use the new capital largely for acquisitions.

The company also made its first acquisition, purchasing Prezentium, a service-led presentation company working in the life sciences space. In an unusual arrangement, Prezent founder Rahul Mishra was one of the founders of Prezentium. Mishra said that since the inception of his new startup, he has been the non-operating head of Prezentium. The two startups already have an existing relationship, with Prezent using Prezentium as a go-to-market partner. The acquisition essentially brings Mishra’s two projects under one roof, allowing Prezent to use Prezentium’s customer base to offer its AI suite to more customers.

There are a lot of companies trying to create AI-powered presentation building tools, including… Presentations.ai, Lyca, Gammaand Chronicle. It is worth noting that all of these companies have Accel as a backer. While most focus on consumers and small business users, Prezent wants to stick to an enterprise strategy, targeting larger companies. Previously, the company stated that it wanted to expand its offerings to different sectors, including finance and manufacturing. However, Mishra noted that the company currently wants to focus on serving clients in the life sciences and technology industries.

“There are a lot of tools out there trying to make presentations beautiful. We want to provide the best tools for business communications. I think presentation is one of the frontiers in companies that has not yet been 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 to deliver presentations for each specific industry.

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

“The reality of enterprise AI is that while AI can do many things, it cannot teach people (how to) use AI. That’s why we want to place presentation engineers in enterprises to help our customers adopt the product faster,” Mishra said.

AI startups are looking to acquire service companies to leverage existing customer bases and provide better personalization to enterprise customers. Start your digital avatar D-ID has acquired Berlin-based video company Simpleshowa Google-backed legal technology startup Lawhive has acquired a UK-based law firm. Through these acquisitions, AI startups want 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 training, medical writing and communications consulting firms.

Mark Terbek, a partner at Greycroft who has invested in multiple rounds in Prezent, said the venture firm likes to find areas where companies have used expensive agencies in the past to fill a need, and now there are AI tools available to try to do the same tasks.

“We felt that Rajat and Present were very focused on solving customers’ specific needs for business communications. Additionally, we saw software evolving rapidly to adapt to end users’ workflows and help them save time,” he told TechCrunch over a phone call.

Going forward, Prezent wants to add better customization to its product so that the AI ​​tool learns the style of everyone in the organization. He also wants to add multimedia capabilities to Deck Creations, allowing users to use text, audio or video as input for presentations. Like Sythesia and D-ID, Prezent wants to add digital avatars to presentations as well.