Gamma hit $100M ARR; “Acquire+AI Upgrade” Strategy to Build a $1B AI Platform in 1+Year
Big opportunity by using AI to reshape every aspect of the traditional software industry.
AI presentation startup Gamma has officially announced a $68 million Series B led by a16z, with participation from Accel, Uncork Capital, and others — bringing its valuation to $2.1 billion.
Gamma revealed that its ARR has surpassed $100 million, with over 70 million total users, 600,000 paying customers, and just 52 full-time employees.
Founder Grant Lee said Gamma’s long-term goal is to fully challenge the two giants of workplace presentations — PowerPoint and Google Slides.
Since the company has been profitable and barely touched previous funding, this round is mainly to maintain strategic flexibility — to enable future acquisitions and enterprise expansion. Its newly launched enterprise accounts are priced at $480 per seat.
In the AI PPT space, Tome once raised substantial funding with big ambitions, but its product targeted too broad a creative audience rather than work-critical scenarios, resulting in poor conversion and a lack of PMF — ultimately forcing it to pivot toward sales-specific use cases.
Gamma, too, went through multiple pivots before finding PMF. First, it tackled the “blank page” problem using AI; second, it focused on single-user experience rather than real-time collaboration — since most presentations are still individual work.
Finally, Gamma embraced the IKEA effect to balance automation and user control, enabling users to feel like co-creators rather than passive recipients, thereby significantly improving engagement and retention.
Sarah Wang, general partner at a16z, said that as a former consultant, she spent an absurd amount of time fixing PowerPoint layouts and Think-Cell charts. When she joined a16z seven years ago, the first app she was told to buy was Think-Cell — now an essential consulting plug-in with over $200 million in annual revenue.
“What used to take hours of resizing and reformatting now takes minutes with Gamma,” Wang said. “It’s fundamentally changing how we work.”
If the past decade of software was about cloud collaboration, the next will be about AI-native creation — tools that not only host your work but co-create it with you. Just as Figma redefined design, Gamma is redefining presentations — and, more importantly, storytelling itself. We are witnessing a transformation in how ideas are exchanged.
The first wave of generative AI captured our imagination with spectacle — AI that could paint, write, and chat like humans. The next wave is about utility: embedding intelligence into everyday workflows so we can work faster, clearer, and more creatively.
PowerPoint and Keynote assumed everyone was a designer — but most people just want to express their ideas better. Gamma flips that assumption: users start from ideas, not slides, democratizing storytelling much like AI coding tools have empowered non-developers to build software.
“Buy+AI Upgrade” Strategy to Build a $1B AI Platform in 1+Year
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a venture studio that acquires indie SaaS products and rebuilds them using AI.
Its “centralized + decentralized” hybrid model has inspired a new generation of companies. And Bending Spoons has already grown into an $11 billion company using this approach.
Now, a new player is following a similar playbook — and has reached a $1B+ valuation just a year after founding.
It acquires traditional, profitable, and trusted software products that risk being left behind by the AI revolution — and uses AI to rebuild and modernize them.
