Slidely AI Is Betting That AI Belongs Inside PowerPoint
The Y Combinator startup didn't build another web app to move your slides into. It put the copilot where the work already happens - and kept the output fully editable.
The analysis was done hours ago. The story was clear. And there you were, at 11pm, still nudging a text box two pixels to the left so it would line up with the one above it. Anyone who has built a consulting deck knows this stretch of the evening - the part where the thinking is finished and the formatting refuses to end. Slidely AI, a Y Combinator company from the Summer 2022 batch, was built around that specific stretch of time.
Most of the AI presentation tools that arrived over the last few years share one assumption: that the deck should move to them. You describe an idea in a browser, a web app spins up something polished, and then you try to get it out into a format your colleagues can actually open and edit. Slidely made the opposite bet. It keeps you inside Microsoft PowerPoint and brings the AI to you.
01 / What it doesAn AI copilot that lives in the ribbon
Slidely AI installs as a native add-in for PowerPoint on both Windows and Mac. From a sidebar inside the app, you can type what you want - "turn this raw data into a summary slide," "redesign this to match our template," "fix the inconsistencies in this deck" - and it generates or reworks fully editable slides in place. There's no export step, because there was never an import step. The file you started with is the file you finish with.
That native footing shapes what the product can do. It reads existing slides and rewrites, redesigns and tightens them. It links to Excel. It handles autolayout so elements snap into a grid. And through a feature the company calls ChatPPT, you can edit slides conversationally - talk to the deck, and it changes.
02 / The customerPeople who live in PowerPoint
Slidely's users are the people for whom slides are the job, not the afterthought: management consultants, corporate strategy and sales teams, founders assembling a pitch, and business-school students. The company points to adoption among consultants (including former BCG people) and among students at schools like ISB. These are audiences with strong opinions about formatting and low patience for tools that produce something almost right.
One number stands out. Slidely reports a Net Promoter Score of 67.6. For software whose main job is fixing your slides - a category people usually tolerate rather than love - that figure is high.
03 / The problemThe hours between the idea and the deck
The problem Slidely targets is quieter than "make me a presentation." It's the gap between having the content and having something board-ready. Alignment. Reformatting. Making slide 14 look like slide 3. Copying a chart style across a deck. Anonymizing a client slide so it can be reused. This is real work, and it is mostly invisible, which is exactly why it's a good place to point software.
Your old decks are the best training data you have. Slidely treats a user's presentation archive as a searchable library it can reuse and restyle - so you stop starting from a blank slide.
04 / The differenceFitting in, on purpose
AI-generated slides have a tell. They tend to look like AI made them: the same rounded cards, the same gradients, the same everything, regardless of whose brand they're supposed to represent. Slidely's answer is to learn from your existing material - fonts, colors, layouts, slide patterns - so the output reads as yours rather than as a template someone downloaded.
Set against the web-first crowd - Gamma, Beautiful.ai, Tome, Plus AI, SlidesAI, Presentations.ai - the contrast is compatibility. Those tools ask you to adopt a new editor. Slidely asks for nothing except the app you already have open.
05 / ProductsFrom makeover to agent
The lineup has grown from single tricks into a suite. Slide Makeover redesigns and reformats existing slides in one pass. Template Search pulls from your own decks and template library. A proofreading pass catches inconsistencies. ChatPPT handles conversational edits. And Slidely Agent 3.0, introduced in 2025, plans and builds full presentations from an idea and source material - the agentic end of the same idea.
06 / The businessFree to try, enterprise to scale
Slidely runs a B2B SaaS model: a free tier and trial funnel into paid individual and team subscriptions, with enterprise plans on top. The enterprise layer is where the native-PowerPoint strategy pays off - private cloud and VPC deployment, custom LLM endpoints, admin controls, and, importantly for buyers, guarantees. The company leads with SOC 2 Type II certification, GDPR compliance, zero data retention on its model providers, and status as a Microsoft AI Cloud Partner.
Enterprises don't buy AI because it's clever. They buy it when it's safe. Slidely's security posture - not a benchmark - is the thing that lets a corporate buyer say yes.
07 / The foundersDeep technical roots
Slidely was founded in 2022 by Apoorve Singhal (CEO) and Nikhil Shah (CTO), both out of IIT Kharagpur. Singhal has an AI research background with collaborations tied to Stanford, Adobe and Brown, and a habit of shipping - as a sophomore he reportedly wrote self-driving car code that outperformed PhD teams, and he built consumer apps like BookMySlot and Auto-OTP that reached more than 10,000 users. Shah is a machine-learning and computer-vision specialist who worked with research labs at the University of Oregon, CERN and Amazon Science, with published work cited more than 100 times.
It's a notable pairing for a company aimed at PowerPoint. The market is old and unglamorous, which is often where strong technical talent has the most room to work.
08 / The marketWhere it fits
The AI presentation space is crowded, but it splits cleanly. On one side are the tools that want to replace PowerPoint with a browser tab. On the other is Slidely, which assumes PowerPoint isn't going anywhere and makes itself useful inside it. That's a smaller front door - you have to already be a PowerPoint user - but it's also a stickier one. The switching cost for a Slidely user isn't leaving Slidely. It's leaving PowerPoint, which most of its customers can't do.
Registered in Lewes, Delaware and operating from Bengaluru, the team is small - around five people. The bet it's making is legible: that the winning move in AI-for-slides isn't a better canvas, but a quieter one that fits the tools people already refuse to give up.