OpenAI Has Acquired Presentation Maker NextSlide

OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that built software to turn prompts, notes, documents and research into editable slide decks, and has folded its entire team into ChatGPT's development. The deal closed earlier this year but was made public this week when founder Ahmed Beshry posted a farewell note. Financial terms were not disclosed, and NextSlide's product has been discontinued as an independent tool.

OpenAI appears to be going in earnest after one of AI’s more popular use-cases — making presentations. The company has acquired NextSlide, a startup that built software to turn prompts, notes, documents and research into polished, editable slide decks, and has folded its entire team into ChatGPT’s development. The deal itself isn’t new — it closed earlier this year — but it was only made public this week, when NextSlide founder Ahmed Beshry posted a farewell note on the company’s website. NextSlide itself was a young company. Beshry started it in April 2025 and ran it for about eleven months before joining OpenAI in March 2026, according to his LinkedIn profile. Neither NextSlide nor OpenAI has disclosed the size of the team, where the company was based, or whether it had raised any outside funding — financial terms of the acquisition itself were also kept confidential, which has become something of a pattern with these OpenAI deals. Beshry’s own background is fairly well documented, though. He studied computer science and chemistry at the University of Alberta, graduating in 2015, and that same year co-founded Caper, a New York-based startup building computer-vision-powered smart carts and autonomous checkout for retail stores. Caper went through Y Combinator in 2016 and raised funding from Lux Capital and First Round Capital among others, before Instacart bought it for roughly $350 million in 2021. Beshry stayed on at Instacart for another three and a half years as Senior Director of Business Development, leaving in March 2025 to start NextSlide the following month. He’d also run a separate venture, QueueHop, as co-founder and Chief Business Officer between 2015 and 2018, alongside his work at Caper. NextSlide, in other words, was his third startup and second exit. The product itself let users feed in raw material — a prompt, a set of notes, a document, a pile of research — and get back a deck that was ready to edit and present. “Our goal was never simply to generate slides faster,” Beshry wrote. “We wanted to make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly.” That team is now working directly on ChatGPT, and Beshry says the mission stays the same, just with a bigger platform underneath it. The acquisition fits a pattern OpenAI has settled into. By one count, the company made 17 acquisitions over the three years through March 2026, with six of those coming in just the first quarter of this year, up from eight for the whole of 2025. Most of them look like this one — small teams, a working product, brought in quietly and folded into an existing surface rather than kept alive as a separate brand. OpenAI has been running a steady stream of these talent-focused deals this year: it absorbed Noam Shazeer’s former Character.AI collaborators https://officechai.com/ai/google-ai-veteran-and-transformers-paper-coauthor-noam-shazeer-joins-openai/ , brought on Peter Steinberger https://officechai.com/ai/openclaw-creator-peter-steinberger-joins-openai-openclaw-to-continue-as-open-source-project/ and his agentic tooling work, and separately acquired UK consulting firm Tomoro largely to staff up its new deployment arm https://officechai.com/ai/openai-deployment-company-acquires-tomoro/ with engineers who already know how to build production AI systems for enterprise clients. Not every acquired product survives contact with OpenAI either — the company bought Hiro Finance in April, shut its app down within a week, and had deleted user data within a month. NextSlide’s own site now carries nothing but Beshry’s goodbye note; the product has effectively stopped existing as an independent tool. What’s notable here isn’t the size of the deal, it’s the direction. ChatGPT has spent the better part of this year turning into something closer to a general productivity surface than a chat window — documents, spreadsheets, code, image generation, and now, apparently, slides in a more serious way. OpenAI had in fact already shipped a ChatGPT for PowerPoint sidebar before this acquisition closed, available across its plans with usage limits tied to each tier. Presentation generation is a natural fit for further expansion because it’s one of the most universally disliked parts of office work, and one of the clearest tasks an AI system can meaningfully shortcut. Give it your notes or your research and get back something you can actually stand up and present, instead of losing an evening wrestling with layouts and bullet alignment. It also puts OpenAI on a collision course with a market that’s already fairly crowded https://officechai.com/ai/ai-tools-for-ppt/ . Microsoft has been pushing Copilot deeper into PowerPoint itself, Google has Gemini doing similar work inside Slides, and standalone tools like Gamma have built a genuinely large user base — Gamma alone has crossed 70 million users https://officechai.com/ai/ai-tools-for-ppt/ and been valued north of $2 billion doing exactly what NextSlide was doing. Building this natively into ChatGPT, rather than leaving it to a separate app people have to open and learn, gives OpenAI a real distribution advantage over all of them — hundreds of millions of people already open ChatGPT every week for other tasks, and presentation generation would just be sitting there as another thing the same window can do. OpenAI hasn’t said anything about what the feature will look like or when a NextSlide-influenced version might show up in ChatGPT. Beshry’s note suggests the team’s job now is less about running a business and more about building this capability inside a system that already has scale, which tracks with how OpenAI has treated most of its recent acquihires — the product gets absorbed, the brand fades out, and the people go to work on making ChatGPT do one more thing better than the app they used to run on their own.