Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design firm Lica in a move to bolster its research lab and expand its visual communication offerings.

Lica, founded by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta, began as an app that transformed screenshots into engaging presentations. It has since grown to offer marketing videos for e-commerce sites, adhering strictly to brand guidelines. The co-founders will lead the new research division at Gamma, with the goal of building AI models around communication methods including video.

Gamma's CEO, Lee Grant, said: 'We have a very similar North Star vision of wanting to make visual communication easy. We focused on frontier research and making sure that became accessible to users. But that’s just one part of the solution. Gamma had focused on building distribution, taking the application to 100 million-plus users.'

Lica's Mehta added: 'The point of the presentation is to communicate a large goal. We are thinking about building a platform where these two goals can be personalized to such an extent that you just get a really good output, and then you’re able to edit for different audiences.'