Gamma acquires Lica and puts its founders in charge of design research

Why it matters

Gamma is pairing a profitable creation platform with Lica's two-founder research operation, betting that structured design models can carry it beyond generated slide decks.

Gamma has acquired Lica, and Lica co-founders Priyaa Kalyanaraman (@pritopian) and Purvanshi Mehta (@purvanshi_mehta) will lead a new design-research group, according to TechCrunch's August 25 report.

The deal gives Kalyanaraman and Mehta a considerably larger surface for the work they started at Lica: teaching AI systems to understand design as a structure of layouts, layers, typography, motion and audience preferences. Gamma gets a research team that has moved from application tooling into the parts of visual generation that general-purpose models still handle inconsistently.

Gamma did not disclose the purchase price or transaction structure. Gamma also has not said whether Lica's product will remain available, be folded into Gamma or be retired. The stated plan centers on the founders and their research, with no resulting product named yet.

Kalyanaraman told TechCrunch that Lica and Gamma share a "North Star vision" around making visual communication easier. The pairing joins Lica's research with Gamma's distribution: Gamma currently claims more than 100 million users, although that figure is company-reported.

From a solo hackathon project to Lica

Lica grew out of a 48-hour experiment. In early 2023, Kalyanaraman entered a Craft Ventures AI hackathon without a team and built DocuTok, an application for converting documents into more engaging formats. She used Replit and AI coding tools to ship the prototype and won the event's $10,000 grand prize, according to a Replit profile of Lica's founders.

The prototype mattered because Kalyanaraman had spent her career close to the problem. She previously held product roles at Microsoft, Snap and Waymo. At Microsoft, she worked on PowerPoint and Microsoft Designer, including AI features; at Snap, she worked on AI-powered augmented-reality products. Her starting thesis was that people with ideas needed design agents capable of turning those ideas into useful communication.

A mutual friend later introduced Kalyanaraman to Mehta, an applied machine-learning researcher with a master's degree in data science from the University of Rochester and a bachelor's degree in software engineering from Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology. Mehta's earlier work covered multimodal learning and applied machine learning before she joined Microsoft, where she worked in data science and security research.

The pair founded Lica in 2023 around a simple observation: creators usually know the story they want to tell, while software forces them to commit early to a single format. Lica initially converted screenshots and screen recordings into tutorials, explainers and product videos, adding transitions, narration, captions, music and stylistic treatments.

In December 2024, Lica raised a $4 million seed round led by Accel, with South Park Commons and Village Global participating. The round also included Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Balaji Srinivasan and Michele Catasta. Lica later concentrated on helping e-commerce teams produce marketing videos that followed brand rules.

That application layer eventually gave way to a deeper research agenda. Mehta wrote in a 2025 account of Lica's technical approach that existing creative AI produced unpredictable results, offered weak editing control and struggled to connect generated assets to commercial goals. Lica built its own rendering engine and layout system to preserve editability across formats.

Gamma is buying the research beneath the design tool

By 2026, Lica's website described its work as building a substrate for training and evaluating AI models as design partners. Lica published a graphic-design benchmark covering 49 tasks across layout, typography, infographics, semantics and animation.

Mehta also co-authored a March 2026 research paper introducing a dataset of roughly 1.55 million layered graphic-design compositions. The dataset retained editable structures such as text, vectors, images, typography, geometry and animation parameters instead of reducing each design to a flat picture. That distinction is central to Gamma's stated goal: generated communication that users can revise for different audiences, formats and contexts.

Gamma brings the commercial engine. Grant Lee (@thisisgrantlee) founded Gamma in 2020 with Jon Noronha and James Fox after working as CFO and head of strategic finance at Optimizely and COO of ClearBrain. Lee, a Stanford-trained engineer, had spent years working in slide decks and started Gamma around the belief that presentation software's basic format needed rebuilding.

Gamma began as a presentation product and has since expanded into websites, documents, social posts, graphics and programmatic content creation through an API. The acquisition gives Kalyanaraman and Mehta a path to work on the models and evaluation systems behind those outputs.

Gamma reported in November 2025 that it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue while profitable. Gamma also announced a $68 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.1 billion valuation, with Accel, Uncork Capital, South Park Commons and Script Capital participating. At the time, Gamma said it had 70 million users and about 50 employees. Its homepage now claims more than 100 million users, a figure that has not been independently audited.

The overlap in investors helped open the door. Accel and South Park Commons backed both Gamma and Lica, and Kalyanaraman said those shared relationships meant she and Lee already knew each other. Lica's acquisition is therefore also a compact example of how a concentrated investor network can move research talent between portfolio companies when a smaller product finds a larger distribution channel.

The integration test

Gamma says presentations will remain a core use case. The new group will examine how presentations can become more fluid, interactive and multimodal, and how their visual language can change for a particular audience. Mehta told TechCrunch that the aim is to personalize both the communication goal and the resulting output while preserving the user's ability to edit it.

That is a harder problem than generating attractive slides from a prompt. Gamma must translate Lica's benchmarks, datasets and rendering work into software that behaves reliably for millions of users. The output has to remain editable, respect brand constraints and adapt across a deck, webpage, social asset or video without losing the underlying narrative.

Canva, Microsoft, Google, Pitch and a growing group of AI-native design products are pursuing variations of the same broad market. The founders describe Gamma's contribution as distribution and a focused product organization. Lica gives Kalyanaraman and Mehta a chance to turn their research thesis into a mass-market system rather than another isolated creative-AI demo.

The acquisition puts both founders in the role they had been building toward since DocuTok: developing the design intelligence underneath the interface. Gamma now has to prove that the research can produce a new communication format, rather than simply better-looking versions of the old one.