Quick Facts
- OpenAI acquired NextSlide, a startup that converts prompts and documents into editable slide presentations, with the deal closing in March 2026.
- The entire NextSlide team is now working on ChatGPT, marking OpenAI’s sixth acquisition in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
- Founder Ahmed Beshry previously co-founded Caper, which Instacart acquired for roughly $350 million in 2021, making NextSlide his second exit.
OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, an AI-powered presentation startup, the company announced on August 8, 2026. The deal closed several months earlier, with the full NextSlide team already working on ChatGPT by the time the announcement went public. Financial terms were not disclosed.
NextSlide built software that converted prompts, notes, documents, and research files into polished, editable slide decks without requiring design experience. Founder Ahmed Beshry started the company in April 2025 and ran it for roughly eleven months before joining OpenAI in March 2026.
“The NextSlide team is now at OpenAI, helping build ChatGPT,” Beshry wrote on the company’s website. “We’re excited to continue pursuing that same mission: building AI products that help people create, communicate, and turn their ideas into meaningful work.”
Beshry credited Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI deployment, with recognizing NextSlide’s vision and facilitating the deal. The NextSlide website now carries only a farewell note, with the product no longer available as a standalone offering.
The acquisition follows a classic acqui-hire pattern OpenAI has used repeatedly. A small team with a working product moves inside an existing product line rather than surviving as an independent brand. OpenAI has not disclosed the size of the NextSlide team, its location, or whether it raised outside funding.
The deal is part of an accelerating acquisition pace at OpenAI. The company has acquired 17 companies over the past three years, including eight in 2025 and at least six more by late March 2026. That compares to two acquisitions in 2024 and one in 2023. In January 2026 alone, OpenAI closed three deals: Convogo, Torch Health, and Crixet.
OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round in March 2026 at an $852 billion valuation, giving it significant capital to continue buying teams and technology.
The strategic direction is clear. Presentation generation requires taking unstructured input and returning structured, editable output, a workflow that maps directly onto ChatGPT’s existing canvas and file-handling features. Absorbing that capability into ChatGPT rather than leaving it to a standalone tool positions OpenAI’s flagship product as a broader content creation platform.
That puts ChatGPT in closer competition with Microsoft’s PowerPoint, a core component of Office 365. Microsoft is both a major investor in and infrastructure partner for OpenAI, which makes any feature overlap between ChatGPT and Office products a notable development for enterprise software buyers.
Beshry is a repeat founder with a track record in high-exit startups. 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 systems for retail stores. Caper went through Y Combinator in 2016, raised funding from Lux Capital and First Round Capital, and was acquired by Instacart for roughly $350 million in 2021. Beshry stayed at Instacart for another three and a half years as Senior Director of Business Development before leaving in March 2025 to start NextSlide.
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