Gamma acquires Accel-backed design startup Lica

🚨 Flash Sale 🚨 Get $100 off your Disrupt 2026 ticket Back by popular demand: Save up to $300 on Disrupt Presentation startup Gamma has acquired Accel-backed design startup Lica in a bid to build out its own design research lab, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Lica’s co-founders will lead the effort.

Lica started off as an app that could turn screenshots and recordings into project presentations and videos. Founded by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta in 2023, the company a year later raised $4 million from investors including Accel, South Park Commons, and Village Global. Over the past couple of years, it has focused on working with e-commerce sites to create marketing videos that adhere to brand guidelines. Kalyanaraman said Lica wanted to build AI models around communication methods, including video and design, and the founders were familiar with Gamma’s CEO, Lee Grant, as both companies are backed by Accel and South Park Commons. Those conversations eventually led to the acquisition. “We have a very similar North Star vision of wanting to make visual communication easy. We focused a lot on frontier research and making sure that became accessible to users. But that’s just one part of the solution. Gamma had focused a lot on building distribution, taking the application to 100 million-plus users. Given how fast things are moving, we decided to join forces,” Kalyanaraman told TechCrunch. Gamma will continue to focus on helping people build presentations, but like other design companies, it’s also started offering image generation. The company says it now wants to explore different formats of communication with the new research division. “Presentations for us are today a core use case, but how do we expand what presentations look and feel like, and how do people engage with them in the future? What visuals are possible? How interactive are they?