The acquisition gives OpenAI a team focused specifically on turning source material into visual presentations. NextSlide’s product was designed to take several forms of user input and produce a finished deck that could still be edited, positioning it as a creation tool rather than simply a presentation generator.
Beshry described the startup’s broader objective as an effort “to make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly.” He said joining OpenAI would allow the team to “continue pursuing that same mission: building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work.”
The announcement comes after a relatively short run for NextSlide. The startup was founded in mid-2025, putting its acquisition roughly within its first year. Beshry said separately that news of the transaction arrived “a few months late” because the deal had happened “earlier this year.”
It also marks Beshry’s second startup exit. He previously co-founded Caper AI, which developed smart carts and cashierless checkout technology. Instacart acquired that company in 2021.
For OpenAI, NextSlide follows a broader run of acquisitions spanning both large transactions and smaller teams. The company paid $6.5 billion for io, the hardware startup associated with Jony Ive, and $1.1 billion for analytics company Statsig. It has also brought in teams behind personal finance apps Hiro and Roi.
NextSlide stands out because its technology maps directly to productivity work inside ChatGPT. OpenAI has already expanded the product beyond conversational responses through documents, file handling, and other tools for creating and working with content. Presentation creation adds another format to that collection.
ChatGPT Work further extends that direction by allowing an agent to operate across a user’s applications and files while remaining engaged with longer-running projects. OpenAI’s agents have surpassed 10 million users, according to the original reporting, as the company seeks greater adoption among finance, sales, and operations teams.
The expansion also puts OpenAI closer to Microsoft’s established productivity business. Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest backer, has integrated OpenAI technology across Office, Windows, and Bing. Adding presentation capabilities to ChatGPT therefore creates more overlap with software categories already served by Microsoft.
That relationship has also drawn regulatory attention, with authorities in the European Union and United Kingdom examining the ties between the companies.
Google is pursuing its own approach to AI productivity. Gemini Spark, introduced at I/O, operates as an always-on assistant that can receive instructions through Gmail. Rather than acquiring separate productivity products, Google can connect AI capabilities with software it already operates.
OpenAI is approaching the opportunity from a different starting point. Its acquisitions can add specialized product expertise directly to ChatGPT, with NextSlide bringing experience in one particularly established workplace format: presentations.
The acquisition itself is small compared with OpenAI’s larger deals, but the destination of the NextSlide team is significant. Instead of continuing as an independent presentation company, its employees are now working on ChatGPT, placing their presentation-building expertise inside OpenAI’s core product.
This analysis is based on reporting from TNW.
Image courtesy of Shopifreaks.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
