Ex-Microsoft employees get $4M from Accel to build an AI tool for product presentations
Product teams often have tons of screen recordings and screenshots that end up unused. Image production using those screen
Ex-Microsoft employees get $4M from Accel to build an AI tool for product presentations
Product teams often have tons of screen recordings and screenshots that end up unused. Image production using those screen recordings has been time-consuming and expensive. That’s why two former Microsoft employees started to build Lica, which is an AI tool that easily creates tutorials and product videos out of screenshots and screen recordings.
The startup was founded in 2023 by Priyaa Kalyanaraman, who has worked as a product manager at Microsoft, Snap, and Waymo, and Purvanshi Mehta, who worked at Microsoft as a data scientist and project manager.
Kalyanaraman — who worked on PowerPoint and Microsoft Designer, including on adding AI features to these products — said that she saw a lot of demand from business users to add AI assistants to business creation.
“I wanted to start something, give everyday people design agents that help them communicate better. But I was on a visa, and it was challenging for me to start my own company. “I built a small demo in a hackathon and put it on Twitter (now X), where Replit’s Amjad Masad saw it and expressed interest,” Kalyanaraman said.
Mehta was also building projects of her own for content personalization. A mutual friend introduced them both, and they decided to build a tool for image storytelling because they felt tools were flashy and ineffective.
Lica has raised $4 million in a seed round led by Accel, with participation from South Park Commons, Village Global, and angels like Replit CEO Amjad Masad, former a16z general partner Balaji Srinivasan, and Replit president Michele Catasta.
Aditya Agarwal, a managing partner at South Park Commons who has worked at companies like Dropbox and Meta, said traditionally, people would build a combination of documents and slides to get their ideas across. On the other hand, image development was expensive and time-consuming. He believes Lica is plugging that gap.
“The vast majority of the time, we would report using a combination of documents and slides because these are artifacts that anybody can produce in an organization. To produce videos, we went to different agencies depending on the requirement. “We wouldn’t produce an image for a lot of communication internally or externally because it wasn’t feasible,” Agarwal said.
The duo first started work on a model that gives you the ability to process any kind of multimodal input and predict the sequence of action and product-specific media according to that. However, the company decided to focus on image first, targeting prosumers and teams like product, customer success, and sales.
The startup has a tool that helps you build a product image or an explainer out of a screen recording. Lica can automatically add transitions, background music, and effects. The company’s editing tool gives you the freedom to add some parts, like text for narration, manually. You can also guide the AI assistant through prompts to give the image a specific voice, such as “Make a tutorial-styled image in Gen Z language.”
First the image is generated, you can also edit parts like voiceover tone, captions, language, style, and music through prompts.
“A lot of people don’t have the vocabulary of what they want out of an image. That leads to multiple time-consuming iterations until they get the final image. “We are giving you an AI assistant who acts like your image producer and works quickly,” Kalyanaraman said.
The founders noted that the tool also understands design aesthetics well. In instances where a user inputs unusual design or color choices, the tool makes respite that the end product looks pleasant and not off-putting.
Mehta mentioned that an AI assistant has two kinds of models: an orchestrator that puts together different parts of the presentation, including choosing the best voice for the narration, and a layout generator that takes deva of how different parts of screen recording or text appear on the screen The company uses a mix of open source and close source models for other parts like audio generation.
Lica currently has a free tier that allows you to create 10 videos with a limit of three minutes per image and three downloads per month. You can share $49 a month to generate unlimited 10-minute videos and get 10 downloads along with access to branded templates.
While the current focus of the startup is on product and tutorial videos, in the upcoming months, Lica will look to tune its AI assistant for more formats of videos, such as marketing, presentation, social media, and investor pitches.
Lica might not have direct Competitors, but companies and startups generally use anything from a Zoom call to screen recording to make a rudimentary image, with a tool like Loom to polish it up. AI-centric startups like D-ID and Synthesia have used avatars for tutorial videos or internal messaging.
Accel’s Sameer Gandhi believes the startup has the right mix of quality of the team and its product approach.
“Lica differentiates itself by combining advanced AI capabilities with intuitive design in a single platform, allowing users to maintain creative control while benefiting from AI-assisted capabilities. Coupled with the team’s generative AI and product development background, we believe they’re uniquely positioned to address a key market need that other solutions have yet to fully capture,” he told TechCrunch over email.
