OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that built software for turning raw material into finished presentations, with the NextSlide team now working on ChatGPT. Founder Ahmed Beshry announced the move in a note on the startup’s website. He did not disclose financial terms.
NextSlide’s product converted prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable presentation, the pitch being that producing a deck should not depend on design skills or hours of manual layout work. Beshry said the company started a little over a year before the announcement.
“The NextSlide team is now at OpenAI, helping build ChatGPT,” Beshry wrote. “We’re excited to continue pursuing that same mission: building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work.”
A second exit for Beshry, a productivity push for OpenAI
The deal marks a second acquisition for Beshry as a founder. He was previously a co-founder of Caper AI, the smart-cart and cashier-less checkout company, which Instacart acquired on October 19, 2021 to add AI-powered carts and automated checkout counters to its retailer technology platform. Instacart’s announcement at the time valued the category as a pillar of its enterprise push, with Caper’s carts already deployed at Kroger, Wakefern, and Sobeys stores.
For OpenAI, the acquisition lands as the company keeps folding document and content-creation work into ChatGPT itself. Presentation generation sits squarely in that lane: NextSlide’s whole product was an interface that took unstructured input, such as notes or research, and returned structured, editable output a person could present. That is a capability OpenAI can absorb into ChatGPT’s existing canvas and file-handling surface rather than leave to a standalone tool.
The structure of the deal, as described, follows the acqui-hire pattern OpenAI has used repeatedly: a small team, a working product, and a destination inside an existing product line rather than a brand that survives the transaction. NextSlide’s site now carries only the farewell note, with the product no longer presented as an independent offering.
What Beshry’s note makes plain is the direction of travel. The team is not joining OpenAI to keep building NextSlide under a new owner; it is joining to build ChatGPT. For a startup barely a year old, that is a short path from launch to exit, and a signal that OpenAI is still buying point-solution talent to fill out ChatGPT’s workplace surface rather than building every piece in-house.
