Prezent, a startup empowering customers to build slide decks using generative AI, has raised $20 million as it further develops and refines its AI models for different use cases and expands into new markets.

AI has many different applications — one of which is generating decks for business presentations, as it turns out. Off-the-shelf models tend to be not very good at this because they don’t understand industry-specific language and jargon. That’s where Prezent’s technology comes in.

Los Altos-based Prezent, which has a subsidiary in Bengaluru, was founded in 2021 by Rajat Mishra, who previously worked at companies including Cisco and McKinsey. Mishra says he struggled to overcome stuttering and speech impediments at a young age, which drove his interest in communication tech.

“The idea [for Prezent] was, wouldn’t it be cool if we could build an AI platform that democratizes business communication and makes everyone a great business communicator?” Mishra told TechCrunch in an interview.

Prezent’s platform has users upload their assets and documents, such as Excel files, PDFs, and links, and give Prezent’s AI assistant, called Astrid, context about the company for which they’re creating a presentation. Users can also include team abbreviations and specific terminology, as well as additional preferences and requirements.

Prezent uses openly available AI models fine-tuned on proprietary data, including a dataset of 2 million slide decks, to power its platform, Mishra says. The startup also builds AI models for specific applications, like recommending layouts users should use for particular decks.

For companies on a tight deadline who want a little human polish, Prezent offers an expedited service that turns draft documents into what the company describes as “professional-grade” presentations. The service employs a combination of AI and human reviewers, including consultants and designers, to overnight spruced-up, finalized drafts.

Prezent claims to serve around 150 Fortune 2000 companies, and targets customers in the biopharma and tech industries. Mishra says that the new funding, an all-equity investment and an extension of Prezent’s April 2022 Series A, will help Prezent go after potential clients in financial services and manufacturing and expand its operations to Europe, Japan, and Singapore.

Prezent already has several customers in Europe and is looking to expand into Southeast Asia in Q2 of this year. Last year, the company generated over $10 million in annual recurring revenue, Mishra told TechCrunch.

Prezent also plans to launch APIs to allow developers to create presentations directly from chatbots, apps, search engines, and more using its models.

“DeepSeek recently showed us that AI companies don’t need these massive funding rounds to make a big impact any longer,” Mishra told TechCrunch, adding that Prezent currently has “close to 200” employees, 75% of whom work remotely and are based in India.

Prezent’s latest investment — which values Prezent at “well over” $100 million, according to Mishra — was led by Greycroft with participation from Zoom Ventures, Emergent Ventures, and WestWave. New investors True Global Ventures (TGV), Manulife Ventures, and Alumni Ventures also joined the tranche.

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