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The AI Slide Killer: How Gamma Went From $0 → $100M ARR in 5 Years
Inside the story of how three operators took on PowerPoint — and won.
Deal Lift
November 21, 2025
In partnership with
Hey Deal Lifters 👋🔥
Today’s breakdown is a banger — the kind of story founders dream about.
A tiny, remote team.
A stale market dominated by a dinosaur.
A new way of working.
A pandemic.
A perfectly-timed AI wave.
And a product that grew like a wildfire with nothing but word-of-mouth.
This is Gamma — the “presentation tool that doesn’t feel like a presentation tool.”
And its journey from $0 to $100M ARR in 5 years is a blueprint for every founder trying to break into an entrenched category dominated by giants.
Grab your coffee ☕
This one is loaded with lessons.
🧠 The Spark: “PowerPoint Was Built for Meetings That Don’t Exist Anymore”
It's 2020.
The world is locked indoors.
Zoom fatigue is peaking.
Slide decks are being created at record volume.
Everything is remote.
Everything is async.
Everything is messy.
And in the middle of this chaos, Grant Lee moves from the US to London, newborn baby in hand, working as an investment banker and consultant.
That meant one thing:
➤ Endless slides. Endless decks. Endless formatting hell.
PowerPoint felt like a fossil. Google Slides wasn’t much better.
Grant realized something operators rarely notice:
“The world changed… but presentations didn’t.”
Meanwhile:
Collaboration changed
Storytelling changed
Teams became async
Screens became smaller
Attention spans shrank
AI began creeping into workflows
Slide decks remained stuck in 1999.
So Grant did what any smart operator does:
He called the two people he trusted most.
👉 Jon Noronha
Former Optimizely product lead, expert in growth and experimentation.
👉 James Fox
Engineering leader, shipping machine, zero-fluff builder.
The trio had built high-scale, high-speed systems before.
Now they wanted to reinvent how people communicate ideas.
This was the beginning of Gamma.
🧱 Fall 2020 — Building Gamma During a Global Lockdown
Grant, Jon, and James started building during peak pandemic — from different countries, in different time zones.
No office.
No whiteboarding.
No brainstorming dinners.
Just execution.
Their goal wasn’t to build a prettier slide tool.
Their goal was to kill the slide deck format entirely.
They wanted something:
modular
fluid
interactive
embeddable
shareable
async
mobile-friendly
effortless
Something that behaves like a mix between:
Notion
Keynote
Canva
and a website builder
But with one major twist:
👉 “Anyone should be able to create beautiful content in minutes.”
That vision made investors lean in.
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💸 October 2021 — $7M Seed Round
Accel and Afore Capital backed the team with $7 million in seed capital.
This allowed the team to:
hire slowly
build a tight engineering culture
focus on product depth, not hype
avoid unnecessary bloat
But by the end of 2021?
They didn’t have explosive traction yet.
Most founders panic here.
The Gamma team didn’t.
They doubled down on fundamentals.
🚀 2022 — Public Beta, Slow Growth, and a Critical Juncture
Gamma launched its public beta in 2022.
They got 60,000 users.
Solid, not insane.
But they were burning runway and had ~12 months of cash left.
This is the point where 90% of startups die:
market is slow
messaging unclear
usage okay, not breakout
investors watching
pressure rising
The team knew something needed to change.
And then the breakthrough came.
🤖 March 2023 — The AI Integration That Changed Everything
Gamma integrated AI into the core product.
Not as a gimmick.
Not as a sidebar.
Not as a “generate slide” button.
They built AI-native content creation.
Gamma’s AI could:
generate decks
improve writing
redesign layouts
auto-format
rewrite
restructure
visualize
produce beautiful templates instantly
Suddenly, creating a presentation became:
1. Type an idea
2. Watch Gamma generate a stunning deck
3. Edit it like a doc
This was the unlock.
Then they layered in two brilliant growth hacks:
⚡ Growth Hack #1: “Made with Gamma” Badge
Every deck exported or shared had a small badge.
People clicked it.
Landed on Gamma.
Signed up.
Told others.
A viral loop disguised as a footer.
⚡ Growth Hack #2: Referral Program
Gamma rewarded users for bringing friends in.
AI + shareability + referral incentives → virality engine activated.
📈 The Results: 10 Million Users in 9 Months
This is unheard of for a B2B productivity tool.
Gamma exploded across:
universities
startups
consulting teams
product managers
sales teams
design communities
creators
agencies
It became the default for pitches, fundraising decks, onboarding docs, and async communication.
Gamma went viral in dozens of countries simultaneously.
The team grew from 10 → 30 people.
Still tiny. Still lean. Still deadly.
💵 May 2024 — $12M Series A Led by Accel
With:
massive user growth
near-perfect retention
strong creation metrics
viral loops
AI differentiation
Accel doubled down.
But here’s the wild part:
👉 Gamma became profitable right before raising their Series A.
In a world where most AI startups burn cash like jet fuel?
Gamma was cash-flow disciplined and efficient.
💲 Early 2024 — Profitability With a 30-Person Team
This is unheard of for a hypergrowth company.
A 30-person team running:
AI infra
design tools
collaborative platform
real-time editor
global usage
massive user base
And still profitable.
The reason?
➤ AI-native workflows = high retention
➤ Lean engineering = low burn
➤ No bloated org = no drama
This is what execution looks like.
🏔️ April 2025 — $50M ARR
Gamma crossed:
👉 50 million users
👉 $50M ARR
👉 explosive global traction
Remember:
This is a productivity tool going up against Microsoft, Google, Apple, Canva, and Notion.
Most people thought it was impossible.
Gamma proved otherwise.
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💰 November 2025 — $100M ARR + $68M Series B at $2.1B Valuation
Gamma announced:
$100M+ ARR
50M+ users
$68M Series B
Led by a16z
$2.1B valuation
In just 5 years.
That’s Shopify-tier early growth.
That’s Slack-level product adoption speed.
That’s Canva-like virality.
And it all started with:
3 founders
remote collaboration
a broken category
a massive shift in work
and a perfectly timed AI wave
Gamma didn’t disrupt PowerPoint.
Gamma made PowerPoint irrelevant.
🧠 Why Gamma Won (5 Tactical Levers)
1️⃣ They entered a stale, enormous market
Presentations are a $50B+ behavioral category.
Everyone uses them.
No one loves them.
Perfect setup.
2️⃣ They built an AI-native product
Not AI sprinkled on top.
AI in the foundation.
3️⃣ They made the output inherently viral
Every deck is a growth channel.
4️⃣ They focused on async communication
This is where the world is heading.
Gamma rode the wave early.
5️⃣ They operated lean
No fat.
No bureaucracy.
Just shipping.
🧩 Founder Takeaways You Can Use Today
✔️ If a category sucks, don’t avoid it — attack it.
Pain creates opportunity.
Product-led growth compounds.
✔️ Your MVP must solve the new workflow, not the old one
Gamma wasn’t “PowerPoint but cleaner.”
It reinvented the format entirely.
✔️ Small teams can crush giants
If the product is 10x better, distribution takes care of itself.
✔️ AI isn’t the strategy — the UX is
AI is the engine.
Experience is the vehicle.
🎯 Final Deal Lift Takeaway
Gamma’s rise is proof of one thing:
No incumbent is unbeatable. Not even PowerPoint.
If founders focus on:
real user pain
new ways of working
compounding virality
speed of execution
AI-native product design
They can win in any category — even if it’s been dominated for 30+ years.
The world rewards:
bold bets
simple products
smart distribution
and founders who execute faster than everyone else.
Gamma isn’t just a slide tool.
It’s a signal.
A signal that anything outdated is ripe for disruption — and the next billion-dollar opportunity might be sitting in front of you right now.
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