Ex-Microsoft employees get $4M from Accel to build an AI tool for product presentations

Product groups typically have tons of display recordings and screenshots that find yourself unused. Video manufacturing utilizing these display recordings has been time-consuming and costly. That’s why two former Microsoft staff began to construct Lica, which is an AI instrument that simply creates tutorials and product movies out of screenshots and display recordings.

The startup was based in 2023 by Priyaa Kalyanaraman, who has labored as a product supervisor at Microsoft, Snap, and Waymo, and Purvanshi Mehta, who labored at Microsoft as a knowledge scientist and challenge supervisor.

Kalyanaraman — who labored on PowerPoint and Microsoft Designer, together with on including AI options to those merchandise — mentioned that she noticed plenty of demand from enterprise customers so as to add AI assistants to enterprise creation.

“I needed to begin one thing, give on a regular basis folks design brokers that assist them talk higher. However I used to be on a visa, and it was difficult for me to begin my very own firm. I constructed a small demo in a hackathon and put it on Twitter (now X), the place Replit’s Amjad Masad noticed it and expressed curiosity,” Kalyanaraman mentioned.

Mehta was additionally constructing initiatives of her personal for content material personalization. A mutual buddy launched them each, and so they determined to construct a instrument for video storytelling as a result of they felt instruments had been flashy and ineffective.

Lica has raised $4 million in a seed spherical led by Accel, with participation from SouthPark Commons, Village International, and angels like Replit CEO Amjad Masad, former a16z normal associate Balaji Srinivasan and Replit president Michele Catasta.

Aditya Agarwal, a managing associate at South Park Commons who has labored at corporations like Dropbox and Meta, mentioned historically, folks would construct a mixture of paperwork and slides to get their concepts throughout. However, video growth was costly and time-consuming. He believes Lica is plugging that hole.

“The overwhelming majority of the time, we might report utilizing a mixture of paperwork and slides as a result of these are artifacts that anyone can produce in a corporation. To provide movies, we went to completely different businesses relying on the requirement. We wouldn’t produce a video for lots of communication internally or externally as a result of it wasn’t possible,” Agarwal mentioned.

The duo first began work on a mannequin that offers you the flexibility to course of any type of multimodal enter and predict the sequence of motion and product-specific media based on that. Nonetheless, the corporate determined to concentrate on video first, concentrating on prosumers and groups just like the product, buyer success, and gross sales.

The startup has a instrument that helps you construct a product video or an explainer out of a display recording. Lica can routinely add transitions, background music and results. The corporate’s modifying instrument provides you the liberty so as to add some components, like textual content for narration manually. You may also information the AI assistant via prompts to present the video a selected voice, corresponding to “Make a tutorial-styled video in Gen-Z language.”

As soon as the video is generated, you can too edit components like voiceover tone, captions, language, type, and music via prompts.

“Lots of people don’t have the vocabulary of what they need out of a video. That results in a number of time-consuming iterations till they get the ultimate video. We’re providing you with an AI assistant who acts like your video producer and works shortly,” Kalyanaraman mentioned.

The founders famous that the instrument additionally understands design aesthetics effectively. In situations the place a consumer inputs uncommon design or shade selections, the instrument makes positive that the tip product appears nice and never off-putting.

Mehta talked about that an AI assistant has two sorts of fashions: an orchestrator that places collectively completely different components of the presentation, together with selecting the very best voice for the narration, and a structure generator that takes care of how completely different components of display recording or textual content seem on the display. The corporate makes use of a mixture of open-source and close-source fashions for different components like audio era.

Lica presently has a free tier that means that you can create 10 movies with a restrict of three minutes per video and three downloads per 30 days. You’ll be able to pay $49 a month to generate limitless 10-minute movies and get 10 downloads together with entry to branded templates.

Whereas the present focus of the startup is on product and tutorial movies, within the upcoming months, Lica will look to tune its AI assistant for extra codecs of movies, corresponding to advertising and marketing, presentation, social media, and investor pitches.

Lica won’t have direct rivals, however corporations and startups usually use something from a Zoom name to display recording to make a rudimentary video, with a instrument like Loom to shine it up. AI-centric startups like D-ID and Syenthesia have used avatars for tutorial movies or inner messaging.

Accel’s Sameer Gandhi believes the startup has correct mix of high quality of the staff and its product method.

“Lica differentiates itself by combining superior AI capabilities with intuitive design in a single platform, permitting customers to take care of inventive management whereas benefiting from AI-assisted capabilities. Coupled with the staff’s generative AI and product growth background, we imagine they’re uniquely positioned to handle a key market want that different options have but to completely seize,” he informed TechCrunch over e mail.