Gamma: The AI native anti-PowerPoint rewriting how we share ideas

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead.

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email:

• 💡 This startup is lets anyone turn rough ideas into polished presentations, websites, and documents in minutes.
  

• 📈 They’ve just hit $100M+ ARR, serving over 70M users with a team of 50 people, running profitably.
  

• 🚀 They have raised about $90M so far, including a $12M Series A in 2024 led by Accel and a Series B that valued the company at $2.1B, after earlier pre-seed and seed rounds of a little over $2M and $4M.

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Gamma 📈

Gamma was founded by Grant Lee, James Fox, and Jon Noronha in 2020.

It’s an AI-powered visual storytelling platform that aims to be the anti-PowerPoint. It gives people a new medium to present ideas, teach, sell, and explain, without having to manually format slides.

Instead of fixed 16:9 slides, Gamma uses flexible “cards”. These cards can be any height, are responsive to mobile, and can embed rich content like websites and videos. 

Gamma takes a content first, design later approach. You pour in your idea, paste a wall of text, or upload a PDF, and the AI helps turn it into a clear, visual narrative. 🤖

Gamma runs a multi-model setup with 20+ AI models for text, images, audio, and video. It picks the right model for each task to balance quality and cost. For example, tools like Perplexity help with outlines and live web research.

The newest version, Gamma 3.0, adds:

• Gamma Agent that acts like an on-call design lead. It can “make this more visual”, rewrite sections, search the web for missing context, match your brand, or even redesign the whole deck with one prompt.
  

• A Gamma API that can plug into Zapier, Make, and internal tools, turning meeting notes, course outlines, CRMs, and more into on-brand decks, landing pages, and QBRs at scale.
  

• Smart Diagrams that convert complex ideas into clean visuals without manual design.

Gamma is horizontal by design. Consultants, sales teams, marketers, founders, teachers, and operators can all use the same engine to ship decks, landing pages, proposals, and recap docs in minutes instead of hours.

Backstory 👀

Grant Lee took a classic high-achiever path early on. He studied Mechanical Engineering (BS) and Biomechanical Engineering (MS) at Stanford.

Instead of going straight into hardware, he went into investment banking and consulting, where he lived inside PowerPoint and Google Slides. 

That period gave him a clear view. Knowledge workers spent huge amounts of time aligning boxes and resizing charts instead of improving ideas.

Grant later joined Optimizely as the first finance hire and eventually led finance as CFO. Optimizely was all about A/B testing and experimentation, and that mindset became a core part of how he thought about product and growth.

While at Optimizely, Grant and James Fox ran a side business selling custom sunglasses (Spectre). It was a small project but gave them a taste of building a product on the side.

After Optimizely, Grant became COO at ClearBrain, a five-person startup that grew to millions in ARR and was later acquired by Amplitude. That experience took him through the whole journey from zero to acquisition.

Post-acquisition, Grant advised early-stage startups and realized he wanted to build his own company from the ground up. 

The pain point that stuck with him was still presentations. He felt the ratio was broken. People spent 90% of the time on formatting, 10% on the actual story.

In 2020, while living in London, Grant reached out to James Fox and Jon Noronha in San Francisco. 

Nights and weekends, they started prototyping a new format. Something that blended deck, doc, and website into one experience.

They explored two paths in parallel:

• A virtual office product.
  

• A reimagined presentation medium.

They chose presentations because they saw it as a compounding category. 

Presentations sit at the center of selling, teaching, and decision making. Improving that workflow can create deep, durable value.

Fundraising was not smooth. Over Zoom pitches during the pandemic, one investor called Gamma “the worst idea I’ve ever heard”, arguing they could not beat PowerPoint’s distribution.

Instead of backing off, the team treated that as a constraint. They decided that product and growth needed to be tightly linked from day one. 

The product itself had to be the growth engine.

The Hustle 🤑

The first version of Gamma was built quietly. The team launched a simple landing page and waitlist and invited early adopters into a private beta in 2021.

They used their own product as their pitch deck. 

Every investor and early user saw Gamma in action through a Gamma link. The medium sold the message.

In fall 2022, they opened up to a public beta and launched on Product Hunt. Gamma became Product of the Day, Week, and Month. 

The launch spiked signups but the growth curve flattened after the initial buzz.

At that point, Gamma was not yet AI-native. It was a better deck format, but it did not feel “magic” from the first touch. Word of mouth was limited and runway was shrinking.

With about 12 months of runway left in early 2023, the team ran a four-month sprint to rebuild the experience around AI.

They set a simple rule: the first 30 seconds in Gamma had to feel like a superpower. 

You paste messy content or write a short prompt. Gamma should turn that into a clean, structured, on-brand narrative automatically.

They integrated AI into every step. Idea generation, outlining, slide creation, visual tweaks, rewriting, and image editing. Gamma felt less like software and more like an expert design partner sitting beside you.

In March 2023, they released the AI-powered version. Growth exploded. 

Gamma gained 10M users in nine months after that launch.

Instead of hiring aggressively, the company chose to hire painfully slowly. At $100M ARR, the team is only about 50 people. 

The culture is built around values that spell ECHO. Empathy First is central. They hire generalists who act like player-coaches, owning big scopes while staying close to the work. 

The result is striking. They have had zero employee attrition over five years.

On growth, Gamma leans into product-led loops. Every Gamma is a shareable link. When someone sends a deck to a client or a manager, Gamma earns a new impression. 

Over 50% of user growth comes from word of mouth.

They also power GTM through influencer marketing.

The Influencer Marketing Playbook 📣

Gamma’s growth story is also a masterclass in creator-led distribution. This is where a lot of founders underestimate the work.

In the early days, Grant personally onboarded every influencer. He did live walkthroughs, brainstormed content angles with them, and gave feedback so they could explain Gamma in their own voice.

He focused on micro-influencers, not celebrities. These are creators with tight, engaged audiences who care about teaching and adding value.

If Gamma becomes one of the tools they genuinely recommend, their audience will treat that as a serious signal.

Once the basics worked, Gamma scaled the model.

They moved from a few creators to an always-on influencer ecosystem. According to a breakdown of their strategy, Gamma now works with 6 agencies and 150+ creators across TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, producing content on a daily basis. 

Around 25% of users come directly from social referrals and 40% from word-of-mouth. Creator marketing sits on top of strong product-led demand instead of replacing it.

About 70% of creator spend goes to micro-influencers (10K–100K followers), with the rest reserved for larger creators during key launches. 

Micro-creators bring higher engagement and more trust, which matters more than raw reach when you are selling a workflow tool.

Gamma also plugged into specialised platforms to run this at scale.

With 1stCollab, Gamma tested 15 different creator audiences, sourced 6,000 creators, and executed campaigns with 1,000+ creators, generating 31M+ organic views at under $13 CPM across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. 

The campaign helped them 5x their user base in about a year while the team spent under an hour per week managing it.

With Hockey Stick Growth, Gamma ran a program that drove 1B+ views with 1,500+ creators across X, LinkedIn, and Instagram, with no extra ad spend beyond the creator deals themselves.

Gamma did not stop at social. Newsletter ads became the second pillar. Through Beehiiv's Ad Network, Gamma sponsored multiple high-signal newsletters like Futurepedia and Future Works News, reaching diverse audiences without managing hundreds of 1:1 publisher deals.

A few patterns stand out in this playbook:

• Creators are treated as partners. They contribute product feedback and campaign ideas, and Gamma listens.
  

• Messaging leans on outcomes, like “save 5 hours a week on decks”, instead of technical AI jargon - it consistently outperforms feature-heavy content.
  

• The team accepts that creator marketing is brand-building first. They care about impressions, trust, and mindshare, then let strong product-led activation and a freemium model convert over time.

Stats 📊

Gamma has more than 70M users, up from 50M at a previous milestone. Users create about 30M Gammas every month. 

They’ve just hit $100M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), up from $50M ARR in under 2 years from launch. The company runs profitably, with a negative lifetime burn rate - they have more cash in the bank than they have raised.

The startup has around 50 employees which means about $2M per employee.

On November 10th 2025, Gamma announced a $61M Series B at a $2.1B valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Accel, Uncork Capital, South Park Commons, Hustle Fund, and others bringing their total raised to $90M.

The round also included a $20 million secondary offering that gave liquidity to early employees

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