52 People Use AI to Make PPTs, Earning 700 Million a Year
52 People, One AI PPT Tool, Annual Revenue Exceeding $100 Million
In Silicon Valley’s AI scene, where most companies chase growth by burning cash in 2025, one company has defied the trend — making billions from doing PPTs.
That company is Gamma.
Gamma boasts 70 million users and is firmly established as an industry rising star. Rather than becoming the next PowerPoint, Gamma is making PowerPoint the “last generation” of its kind.
So, when Karpathy posted asking for a “PPT version of Cursor,” the replies were unanimously: “Gamma!”
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More Investors Arriving — But They’re Earning Even More
Gamma has just officially announced $68 million in Series B funding, led by A16Z, raising its total company valuation to $2.1 billion.
The reasoning from investors was straightforward:
> In the AI era, there’s no reason to keep using outdated software from 1987. We lead the investment in supporting an anti-PowerPoint alternative.
Gamma’s recent strong performance has inevitably caught the attention of many investors.
Take the last $12 million funding round as an example: before they’d even spent a cent of that, new investors were already knocking on their door.
Yet Gamma’s founders remain unfazed:
> We currently have more money in the bank than all the funds we’ve ever raised combined.
In plain terms: Gamma is highly profitable.
Since 2023, Gamma has been consistently profitable, achieving an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $100 million.
With a team of only around 50 employees, that’s roughly $2 million ARR per employee.
For Gamma, VC hype is merely a bonus — they’ve relied on their own business strength from day one.
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From Near Collapse to Rapid Growth
Gamma was founded in 2020 by Grant Lee, Jon Noronha, and James Fox, then all senior managers at Optimizely.
During remote work, Grant Lee’s wife claimed the only desk at home, forcing him to work from a park bench while staring at PowerPoint on his phone in meetings.
Sharing stories with his friend Jon Noronha, he found they both agreed:
Making slides in Google Slides is painful — watching someone else’s Google Slides is just as painful.
This group of “pet lovers,” “woodworkers,” and “board game players” banded together in San Francisco to start their venture.
Their initial idea was a more beautiful PowerPoint alternative — an online layout tool.
It was a massive untapped market: nearly 1 billion people make PPTs every month, but either the process is labor-intensive or the outcome falls short.
Despite new tools like Keynote and Google Slides emerging over the years, PowerPoint’s dominance has remained thanks to the strength of Microsoft Office.
So they shifted their goals towards a true paradigm shift, aiming to return to the essence of PPT creation.
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Identifying the Three Core Pain Points
They began intensive user research and prototyping, forcing themselves to use their own product daily and present with Gamma weekly. After thorough iteration, they summarized the three main pain points of traditional slide-making:
- Formatting burden: users spend 80% of time beautifying slides, and only 20% on content.
- Visual receptivity: if a PPT doesn’t look good, audiences won’t buy into the content.
- Rigid structure: PowerPoint’s fixed process forces people to start designing — but most lack professional training.
After two years of pure product iteration, Gamma launched its public beta in 2022.
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Today, Gamma’s rise mirrors the wider change in content creation — tools that save time, enhance design quality, and let creators focus on ideas are winning globally. For independent creators and teams alike, platforms like AiToEarn are emerging to complement this shift — providing open-source AI-powered content monetization with cross-platform publishing (Douyin, Kwai, WeChat, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest, X/Twitter), analytics, and AI model ranking. Such tools connect seamlessly between content generation and revenue, echoing Gamma’s philosophy: focus on creativity, let the tech handle the rest.
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At first, the data looked incredibly impressive — upon release, the product immediately took first place on Product Hunt for the day, week, and even month. Weekly registrations skyrocketed from 100 users to 3,000 users, a 30× growth.
However, just a few weeks later, the growth rate began to slow down, and user retention was insufficient, since most people still felt that making a PPT with Gamma was too difficult.
At that point, their operating funds were running low, and investors even pressured them to pivot to a different track.
Turning the Tide: Even “Dark Traffic” is Still Traffic
Then ChatGPT appeared, making them realize that AI might solve users’ most frustrating pain point — beautifying slides.
They went all in, deciding not to lay off staff, not to pivot, and giving themselves just three months to go 100% all in on AI.
During those three intense months, they developed six core features, including AI generation, smart layouts and visual styles, AI design suggestions, PDF export, and more — all of which later became Gamma’s key strategies for retaining users.
A Bold Marketing Gamble
As the official release approached, they took a high-risk marketing gamble, creating a promotional video that exaggerated the product’s current capabilities and posting a highly controversial tweet:
> The most valuable skill in business is about to be obsolete. Designing a killer slide used to take days; now AI can do it for anyone in seconds.
Unexpectedly (or perhaps inevitably), Paul Graham saw this and retweeted it with sharp criticism, calling it “nonsense”. The tweet spread like wildfire — AI influencers joined the discussion, and eventually it went viral.
Curious onlookers clicked through and discovered that Gamma’s generated content was actually “pretty impressive.”
(Planned and executed ✅)
Gamma began spreading virally across social media — first 5,000 new users a day, then 10,000, then 15,000… eventually reaching hundreds of thousands.
Retention rates multiplied fivefold compared to before, and the majority of users were willing to pay for the product.
It was clear — they had made the right bet.
Within a single week, they went from obscurity to joining the top tier of Silicon Valley AI content tools, gained massive traction, secured investment from Accel, and broke $1M in ARR.
Yet the company had only 16 employees at the time, and even after scaling, it only grew to today’s 52 employees.
Small team, big revenue — Gamma’s approach to both product and team management follows the same “punch above your weight” philosophy.
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The “Punch Above Your Weight” Operational Philosophy
Gamma’s uniqueness isn’t in text generation alone — it’s in redesigning the presentation interface.
While PowerPoint and Google Slides focus on editing, Gamma emphasizes expression — the user inputs ideas, and AI handles the presentation form.
From concept to slide deck in one click, no manual design needed, producing beautifully styled, brand-consistent PPTs that export seamlessly into PowerPoint or Google Slides.
As Jon Noronha put it:
> We’re not trying to replace PPT; we’re trying to eliminate humanity’s fear of the blank page.
In a productivity arena dominated by giants like Microsoft and Google, Gamma found a niche: AI generation + outstanding aesthetics + instant sharing.
Big firms rely on resource stacking; small teams focus on user experience, identifying the core user need — “let AI help me express myself” — and delivering a decisive hit.
That’s why their hiring philosophy is: painfully slow recruitment.
They maintain high standards, hiring only “A players” who share the company’s values. Management follows a “player-coach” model: leaders work hands-on while guiding the team’s direction.
The result is a flat organization — one person leading three others can deliver what a traditional 20-person team might.
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Growth Tactics
Founder Grant Lee summarized their strategy with four points, starting with:
1. Influencer Marketing:
90% of product influence comes from less than 10% of viral triggers — and sparking that is never accidental.
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In today’s competitive AI content landscape, Gamma’s success story illustrates how small, focused teams can use AI to redefine user experience and growth. This principle aligns with emerging open platforms like AiToEarn官网, which empower creators worldwide to generate, publish, and monetize AI-powered, multi-platform content efficiently. AiToEarn enables simultaneous distribution across platforms such as Douyin, Kwai, WeChat, Bilibili, Rednote (Xiaohongshu), Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest, and X (Twitter), connecting the dots between AI creativity, publishing workflows, and analytics — much like Gamma connected inspiration to finished slides.
1. Identify and Incentivize Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs)
Startups should first list the target KOCs (Key Opinion Consumers) for their products, offer them generous rewards for at least six months, and encourage them to open new accounts. Do not interfere with scripting — let creators exercise creative freedom.
Then, track those high-performing creators and even hire them as advisors to train others.
Ensure ad placement across all social platforms, and consider gathering potential customer channel insights from job applicants during interviews.
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2. Performance Marketing & Branding
To build a brand, startups must be prepared to invest significant time and money, continually testing different creative ideas.
Persist until a specific use case resonates with your audience, then center your work around it.
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3. User Testing
Conduct extensive user testing during the product prototype stage to assess user experience. If random users find the product simple and effective, proceed to launch.
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4. Dogfooding
When the team has multiple ideas, dogfooding can help identify the optimal solution.
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In summary, ability + luck + self-belief are all essential — accumulate strength, seize the opportunity, and execute. Gamma turned the tide this way.
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One More Thing
However, to stage a comeback like Gamma in today’s AI market is far more difficult.
Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong recently published two long posts on 𝕏 pessimistic about AI startups, with Elon Musk chiming in: “That’s exactly right!” 👍
In short, Wong’s view is: foundational models hold core advantages such as computing power, and whenever a new application appears, these models can learn it within days.
This means that for most startups, the development window is extremely short. To make money, you must either monetize quickly or take a differentiated path, aiming for an eventual acquisition by a tech giant.
Yet in either case, the probability of growing into a next-generation AI giant is extremely low. The best chance lies in finding real-world niche applications in highly specialized fields.
Gamma, Perplexity, Runway, Cursor — these Silicon Valley miracles all gambled small against big, and each followed this approach.
While tech giants compete over stronger models, these teams focus on “products that understand people better”.
So will startups automatically vanish the moment foundational models gain the same features? Not necessarily.
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Related References:
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/business/dealbook/gamma-ai-fundraise.html
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRv8g_44q1U
[4] https://x.com/thisisgrantlee/status/1966874658680303880
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6J9PmZZTq8
[6] https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/FfNwSqEKtBIeex6rUImrfw
[7] https://x.com/yishan/status/1987787127204249824
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Final Note: For AI startups navigating this compressed opportunity window, tools that integrate AI content generation, analytics, and multi-platform publishing can be a significant advantage — saving precious time and ensuring reach. Platforms like AiToEarn官网 provide open-source solutions enabling creators to publish simultaneously on Douyin, Kwai, WeChat, Bilibili, Rednote, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest, and X (Twitter). This unified workflow aligns with many of the strategies outlined above, helping startups not just survive but scale quickly.
