Chronicle launches AI agent to revolutionise presentations

Chronicle has announced the public beta of its AI agent for presentations, following a period in which more than 100,000 users, including 10,000 businesses, joined its waitlist.

The company describes Chronicle as an "AI agent for presentations" designed to change how ideas are visually communicated and shared. Many users have dubbed the platform a "Cursor for Presentations" due to its approach, which aims to reinvent storytelling through a combination of artificial intelligence and design expertise.

Chronicle's approach focuses on collaborative creation, assisting users with messaging, design execution, and narrative structure. The tool acts less as a traditional slide editor and more as a brainstorming partner and designer. According to the company, Chronicle can help users craft presentations in minutes that would normally take hours to complete on conventional platforms.

"Our early adopters are creating their best decks in just 10 minutes instead of 10 hours. We built Chronicle not only to make stunning presentations at the speed of thought, more importantly, we want to eradicate bad quality presentations. That is a harder goal but we have made huge breakthroughs," Mayuresh Patole, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, said.

The software is built to conduct research and distil key arguments, ensuring each presentation's content is relevant and impactful. It addresses all aspects of presentation design, including typography, visual hierarchy, spacing, and motion, to achieve a result that the company claims is comparable to that of a professional designer.

The platform also introduces features that aim to help presenters direct audience focus, which Chronicle identifies as essential for effective communication in an age of shortened attention spans. Among these features are "Peek" and "Deep Hover", tools that allow presenters to zoom in, highlight, isolate, or focus audience attention on specific elements of a presentation.

"We've bottled up the storytelling and attention guidance secrets of great presenters and built them into Chronicle. Every template, layout, and widget has been designed to improve the audience experience and nudges creators to tell a story rather than simply dump information. It's like having a laser pointer on steroids: you guide attention with precision, making you an extraordinary presenter," said Patole.

The company was founded by Mayuresh Patole and Tejas Gawande, both of whom describe themselves as "presentation nerds". Their collaboration began at IIT Bombay, where Patole became known for creating distinctive presentations using only standard office tools.

"I was spending countless hours engineering solutions within traditional tools to achieve what should have been simple. With recent advances in AI, we finally have the technology to build what I've been trying to hack together manually for years," Patole noted.

Gawande, drawing on his experience in growth and social media, recognised the changing expectations of modern audiences.

"What worked in presentations a decade ago falls completely flat today. Modern audiences are trained by social media to expect information that's visual, scannable, and high-impact," Gawande said.

The development of Chronicle received early backing with a USD $7.5 million seed funding round led by Accel and Square Peg, which helped the team refine the product in consultation with beta users. The company reports that many beta testers have replaced their existing presentation tools with Chronicle for important meetings and events.

Chronicle is now available for public beta trial. The company states that the platform is designed for a diverse range of users, from those with limited design experience to trained professionals, and from startup founders to corporate executives.

The Chronicle team operates remotely, with members in the US, India, and Australia, and has attracted advisors from companies such as Apple, Google, Slack, Stripe, Superhuman, OnDeck, and Adobe. Chronicle plans to raise an additional USD $20 million in funding later this year and anticipates reaching five million users in the near term.