OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a young startup that built software to turn scattered notes, prompts and research into finished, editable presentations, TechCrunch reported. The entire NextSlide team has now moved onto ChatGPT, where it is working on new features for the chatbot rather than continuing to sell its own product.
The move fits a pattern familiar to anyone following the fast-consolidating AI industry: a small, capable team is absorbed into a larger company, its standalone product retired, and its members redeployed on the parent's flagship platform. It is often called an "acqui-hire", and OpenAI has used the structure repeatedly over the past two years.
A deal announced months after it closed
According to NextSlide founder Ahmed Beshry, the transaction was completed in early 2026 but only made public in the first week of August, when he posted about it on LinkedIn and on the startup's own website. Neither OpenAI nor NextSlide has disclosed the financial terms of the sale.
NextSlide was a relatively new company. Beshry founded it in mid-2025, meaning it operated independently for roughly a year before joining OpenAI, according to reporting on his LinkedIn profile. Its product let users feed in raw material, whether typed notes, uploaded documents or research files, and receive back a polished slide deck that could still be edited by hand.
“"To make visual communication more accessible and help more people express their ideas clearly."”
That, Beshry said, was the mission behind NextSlide. He added that by joining OpenAI, the team intends to keep pursuing that goal by "building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work."
Why presentations matter to OpenAI
For European offices, universities and public institutions, slide decks remain a daily fixture of work, whether for board meetings in Frankfurt, EU policy briefings in Brussels or lecture materials in Milan. Presentation software has traditionally been the territory of Microsoft's PowerPoint and Google's Slides, both now infused with their own AI assistants.
OpenAI folding a presentation-building team directly into ChatGPT signals an ambition to compete on that turf too. Notably, Microsoft is OpenAI's largest investor and the two companies' relationship has grown more competitive as Microsoft builds up its own in-house AI models for products such as Copilot, even as it keeps OpenAI's technology embedded across its software.
The NextSlide acquisition is one of several smaller deals through which OpenAI has been assembling capabilities that mirror a traditional office suite, from documents to spreadsheets to now, slide design, one team at a time rather than through a single, larger transaction.
For NextSlide's small user base, the practical effect is straightforward: the standalone product is winding down as its creators move to ChatGPT, following the same trajectory as several other AI startups OpenAI has absorbed over the past year.
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