OpenAI Buys NextSlide, Aims at Microsoft's Turf

OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a one-year-old startup that turns notes and documents into finished presentations, and folded its small team directly into ChatGPT. The deal closed earlier this year but only became public on August 7, when founder Ahmed Beshry posted the news on LinkedIn. Neither company has disclosed a price.

It's a small deal by OpenAI's standards. It's also the eighth acquisition or acqui-hire the company has made in just over a year, and the pattern behind it says more than the deal itself.

What NextSlide Actually Built

Beshry started the company a little over a year ago on a narrow premise: feed it a prompt, a set of notes, or a research document, and it'd return an editable slide deck rather than a static export. That's a smaller claim than it sounds. Most AI presentation tools generate a deck once and leave the user to fix the layout by hand. NextSlide's pitch was that the output stayed editable inside the tool, closer to how a person would build a deck in PowerPoint or Google Slides than how a one-shot generator would.

Beshry isn't a first-time founder. His prior company, Caper AI, built smart shopping carts for cashier-less checkout and was picked up by Instacart in October 2021 for roughly $350 million. On LinkedIn, he framed the OpenAI deal as a continuation rather than an ending, writing that the NextSlide team is "now at OpenAI, helping build ChatGPT" and pursuing the same mission of turning ideas into finished work.

That's the entirety of the public record on NextSlide's product. No user numbers, no revenue figures, no funding history. What's known is that a working prototype and a small team now sit inside ChatGPT rather than as an independent app.

A Pattern, Not a One-Off

NextSlide isn't an isolated purchase. It is the latest entry in a run of acquisitions that started in mid-2025, and laid side by side, they show a company buying capability faster than it can plausibly integrate it.

Only three of the eight deals carry a public number: io, the largest acquisition in OpenAI's history and the one built around a standalone hardware division; Statsig, a $1.1 billion analytics platform; and TBPN, bought for editorial reach rather than technology. The other five, including a Python developer-tools company and a red-teaming platform used across the industry, closed with no disclosed price at all. That's unusual for deals of Statsig's size and points to a deliberate choice to keep most of the numbers out of the conversation.

The shape of the acquisitions matters more than any single price tag. Hiro, the personal finance app bought in April, was shut down within days of the deal closing, with users given a short window to export their data before the product disappeared entirely. Roi, bought five months earlier, followed the same script. The team joins, the standalone product does not survive contact with ChatGPT.

The Microsoft Overlap

NextSlide is the most direct hit yet on a competitor's product line. PowerPoint belongs to Microsoft, which completed a restructuring of its OpenAI investment in October 2025 that left it holding a 27% stake, since diluted slightly by OpenAI's later $122 billion funding round. The two companies also renegotiated their cloud exclusivity earlier this year, unwinding parts of the arrangement that once tied OpenAI's compute exclusively to Azure.

Microsoft isn't standing still on its own side of that line. Copilot has crossed 20 million paid seats and already builds slides inside PowerPoint through its own AI layer. What changes with NextSlide is that OpenAI now has an in-house engine for the same task, running inside the product where hundreds of millions of people already spend their time each week.

OpenAI folds acquired products directly into ChatGPT rather than operating them as separate brands. Source: commons.wikimedia.org

Who Benefits

OpenAI gets a working presentation engine without the year it would take to build one internally, plus a team that has already solved the harder problem of keeping generated output editable rather than static. For a company racing to make ChatGPT a place where work actually gets finished, not just drafted, that is a real gap closed.

Beshry and his team get a clean exit into a company with the reach to put their product in front of ChatGPT's user base, which OpenAI's last confirmed count put at 900 million weekly users in February. That beats fighting for attention against Canva and Beautiful.ai as an independent app. Given that undisclosed terms are now the norm across OpenAI's acquisitions, the financial outcome for NextSlide's small number of backers is impossible to assess from the outside.

ChatGPT users, eventually, get a presentation feature they don't have to leave the chat window to use. Whether that shows up as a distinct product or just quietly appears inside existing ChatGPT workflows isn't yet clear.

Who Pays

Microsoft has the most to lose in the near term. PowerPoint and Copilot together represent a meaningful share of a Microsoft 365 business built on per-seat pricing, and every feature OpenAI folds into ChatGPT for free or near-free is a reason for a user to test whether they still need the paid alternative. ChatGPT's own market share has been sliding this year, so this is as much defense as offense, but the pressure on Microsoft's product line is the same either way.

PowerPoint is one of the few Microsoft 365 apps OpenAI now competes with directly from inside ChatGPT. Source: commons.wikimedia.org

Smaller AI presentation startups pay too. Gamma and Prezi's AI tools have spent two years building a category around exactly the workflow NextSlide sold, and now compete against a free feature bundled into the most widely used chatbot on the internet rather than against a funded startup selling a subscription.

And NextSlide's own early users, if the Hiro and Roi precedent holds, are the ones most likely to lose access to the product they signed up for once the standalone app winds down.

Eight acquisitions in thirteen months, most of them unpriced and most of them absorbed rather than operated, isn't a company building a portfolio. It's a company buying finished features faster than it can announce them, and letting the brands that built them disappear on the way in.

Sources:

• OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide - TechCrunch
• OpenAI Picks Up AI Presentation Creator NextSlide - PYMNTS
• OpenAI acquires presentation firm NextSlide, its team joins ChatGPT - MediaNama
• OpenAI has bought AI personal finance startup Hiro - TechCrunch
• OpenAI completes for-profit restructuring and grants Microsoft a 27% stake - CNBC
• OpenAI is buying iPhone designer Jony Ive's AI devices startup for $6.4 billion - CNBC
• OpenAI acquires Statsig for $1.1 billion - CNBC