San-Francisco based DeckRobot, a provider of software for enterprise document flow, has announced a seed investment of $1.5 million to help companies effortlessly design hundreds of PowerPoint slides with AI tech. More than 75 percent of its staff is located in Ukraine.
Round details
Alexander Nevinskiy and Matrix Capital led the round with participation from Charles Songhurst, ex-head of Strategy at Microsoft and an early investor in Affirm, Convoy, Formlabs, Classpass, Grove Collaborative, and Easypost. Other private investors include Victor Savyuk (the founder of Dendy console). This follows a $1 million funding round, giving DeckRobot a total of $2.5 million in funding since 2017 when the company was founded.
DeckRobot plans to use the funding to scale up the enterprise sales and technical support teams in the US, UK, and EU. DeckRobot already works with 3 of the Big-4 Audit & Consulting firms as well as a large number of enterprise companies in the US, UK, EU, Africa, Middle East, Russia, and India.
What is DeckRobot
Tony Urban, the founder and CEO of DeckRobot, started DeckRobot after working as a McKinsey consultant, where he made thousands of slides for presentations. In 2017, he figured out how to utilize AI to automate the routine process of making slides.
“I wanted to empower brilliant individuals to use their creativity on something more exciting than aligning text boxes on PowerPoint slides,” says Urban. “Now that DeckRobot’s neural network has analyzed 100 million slides and auto-formatted 10 million presentations, we see great value in saving hundreds of hours of work time for our clients.”
With the rise of remote work practices, over 500 million PowerPoint users make presentations for work and research and waste 15-60 min per slide, getting a consistent design that conveys a compelling message to stakeholders. Employees in enterprises need to follow strict brand guidelines, which they rarely know well. Many PowerPoint users aren’t professional designers and fail to create appealing designs for their presentations.
With the DeckRobot add-on to PowerPoint, users can format or design the whole slide deck in just one click, without relying on a small set of generalized templates. DeckRobot’s AI engine instantaneously turns PowerPoint slide drafts into appealing corporate slides compliant with the corporate brand book. DeckRobot also offers multiple design options for each slide.
The startup plans to partner with large consulting firms to utilize the growing $100B+ business productivity software market (according to Statista) where DeckRobot competes with ThinkCell, Templafy, Beautiful.AI, Matiks, and others.
R&D in Ukraine
The headquarters of the startup is in San Francisco. There are also offices in New York and Moscow, but the largest number of employees are in Kyiv. DeckRobot has its R&D center, which employs 11 people (the startup employs 15 people in total).
As Tony Urban told AIN.UA, DeckRobot plans to hire a minimum of eight more specialists by the end of the year with at least six of them in the Kyiv office.
