By Anshika Mathews · AIM Media House
Most AI startups in 2025 are chasing scale the same way: raise hundreds of millions, hire aggressively, and hope the product catches up. Gamma went the opposite route and now has something most of its peers don’t: revenue, users, and profits.
The San Francisco-based startup builds an AI-powered tool for making slide presentations. That may not sound flashy in an era of AI agents and humanoid robots. But the numbers speak louder than hype: over 17 million users, 250 million gammas created, and $50 million in annual recurring revenue.
Gamma is profitable, growing, and operating with a team of just 30 people. “I want to convey to the market that small teams can do amazing things,” says CEO and co-founder Grant Lee . Founded in 2020 by Lee and two colleagues from Optimizely, Gamma had a slow burn start.
The original idea was to fix the pain of building decks, something Lee knew firsthand from years spent in consulting and finance. But by late 2022, the team had only 60,000 users and about a year of cash left. “We were at a moment of truth,” Lee says.
Three Months That Changed Everything Instead of raising more money, Gamma rebuilt the product. Over three months, the team rewired its infrastructure, redesigned the interface, and overhauled onboarding.
Most critically, it leaned hard into generative AI, embedding models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Google into its backend. “AI can feel overwhelming to users,” Lee explains.
“Our job is to run the tests, do the heavy lifting, and curate the best AI has to offer so our users can create great content without having to think about which model to pick.” The bet worked.
Gamma’s product can now generate a complete, branded presentation from a block of text, removing the need for design skills or template hunting.
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