presentation-software
(9)
Tome Got 20 Million Users. The Money Was Somewhere Else.
A presentation maker became an AI sales researcher, then closed the product that made it famous. Tome's story asks a rude but useful question: what if everyone loves the thing you cannot sell?
Pitch Wants Your Deck to Do More Than Sit Pretty
The Berlin-born presentation app has grown from a handsome slide editor into a full pitching workspace. It is built for teams whose decks need to win attention, survive collaboration, and report back after they leave the room.
Beautiful.ai Built a Presentation App That Tells You “No” - and 100,000 Businesses Said Yes
The PowerPoint challenger’s cleverest idea was not generating more choices. It was removing the bad ones - then selling that constraint as a faster way for teams to think in public.
Ellen Hui Put the Backend Engineer in the Boardroom
After petabyte queries, self-driving reliability, and real-time video, Ellen Hui tried to repair the place where company data so often goes to lose its freshness: the slide deck.
Emaze Put Training Wheels on Design - Then Rode Into the AI Sales Stack
The browser startup once fought ugly slides by limiting your choices. A decade later, that same constraint has become its enterprise pitch: turn approved assets and customer data into personalized content without letting every salesperson freelance the brand.
thorntale
thorntale (YC W24) is a San Francisco software company that built presentation tools for data storytelling. Instead of screenshotting charts from Looker or Snowflake into Google Slides, teams could connect live data sources directly into decks, so charts stayed interactive and up to date - even re-segmentable during a live Q&A. Founded in 2024 by data scientist Dori Wilson with engineers Ellen Hui and John Stimac, the company later pivoted toward an AI-powered presentation editor and shipped a free AI Presentation Review tool before winding the core Presentations product down at the end of 2025.
Plus AI
Plus AI is a Seattle-based software company that builds an AI presentation maker working directly inside Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint. Rather than trapping users in a separate web editor, Plus generates and edits native slides - drafting decks from a prompt, converting documents like PDFs and Word files into presentations, rewriting and remixing existing slides, and matching custom brand templates. Founded in 2021 by former Madrona venture capitalist Daniel Li and ex-BCG and Webflow product leader Chloe Qi, the company has raised roughly $8-10M in seed funding and says its tools have been installed by more than a million users.
Prezi
Prezi is a cloud-based visual communication company best known for inventing the zooming, non-linear presentation - an open-canvas alternative to slide-by-slide decks. Founded in Budapest in 2009 and now dual-headquartered in San Francisco and Budapest, Prezi has grown into a full suite spanning Prezi Present, Prezi Video (presenter-on-screen overlays), Prezi Design/Infograms, and Prezi AI. More than 160 million people have used it to create roughly 400 million presentations.
Jim Szafranski
Jim Szafranski is the CEO of Prezi, the visual communications platform used by over 100 million people worldwide and more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. A MIT computer scientist and Stanford MBA, he joined Prezi in 2015 as COO and rose to CEO in 2020, steering the company's pivot from presentation software to a full visual suite encompassing Prezi Present, Prezi Video, and Prezi Design. Before Prezi, he spent a decade at Fiberlink building MaaS360, a mobile enterprise cloud platform acquired by IBM in 2013. He is known for applying rigorous process frameworks — including OKRs and strategic foresight influenced by Intel's Andy Grove — to scale technology companies.