Beautiful.ai is a presentation software that makes it easy to turn your ideas into beautiful visual stories. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Beautiful.ai CEO Jason Lapp to learn more about the company.
Jason Lapp’s Background
What is Jason Lapp’s background? Lapp said:
“Prior to joining Beautiful.ai, I led several growth-stage companies and spent time running large sales and marketing teams. I have served as the CEO of marketing technology company Kiip, which I led to acquisition, and spent 17 years leading go-to-market as the Chief Growth and Revenue officer at Kantar. In 2021 I joined Beautiful.ai as President and COO before becoming CEO later that year.”
Purpose Of The Company
What is the purpose of Beautiful.ai and why is it special? Lapp shared:
“Beautiful.ai is the AI-integrated presentation platform built for teams. Our platform enables users to craft their stories with confidence and turn their best ideas into powerful presentations that get results. Beautiful.ai does the design thinking for you—our intuitive integrations and all-in-one platform streamline team workflows and enable team members of all skill levels to make great decks fast.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Lapp reflected:
“Reaching our 100,000th paying customer was a milestone I’ll never forget. It represented not only how much we’ve grown as a business, but also the meaningful impact we’ve had on our customers. It was a proud moment for our entire team, celebrating the success of all the hard work we’ve put in and the excitement for the journey ahead.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Lapp and the team faced in building the company? Lapp acknowledged:
“One challenge every sector is facing right now is that the job market is extremely competitive, with employers having a wide pool of great candidates to choose from. This surplus has paradoxically made hiring more challenging. Companies like us are not just looking for skilled candidates, but candidates who perfectly align with our vision and culture. This hyper-selectivity means the hiring process is more competitive and prolonged, creating a new form of labor shortage despite the abundance of talent in our sector. At Beautiful.ai, we’ve worked hard to carefully articulate our vision and culture, making it easier to ensure candidates align.”
Evolution Of Beautiful.ai’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Lapp noted:
“Beautiful.ai started out as a tool made for any individual user and catered to a wide range of use cases. Over time, we’ve refined our focus to target the professionals who are creating presentations without the need for advanced design skills, recognizing that this demographic derives great value from the platform. As part of its evolution, Beautiful.ai shifted towards a SaaS model and incorporated more AI-integrated and automation-powered tools. We’ve also created an abundance of features to help teams keep brand consistency among presentations and increase productivity.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Lapp cited:
“Adding generative AI capabilities into the Beautiful.ai platform was a huge milestone for us as it took so much more off the plate of the end-user. Our primary focus is to save our users time and we care about what they’re spending it on. Features like auto-formatting of slides, Smart Slides templates with built-in layout variations, and the generative AI writing assistant are some of our favorite product updates which have streamlined the presentation creation process astronomically.”
“Our AI Writing Assistant now generates new text in addition to rewriting the user’s text. The AI uses text on any slide as added context so that it can provide the most relevant results. Users can customize the AI assistant’s output to match their brand tone or personal style and save commonly used prompts for consistency across projects. The assistant also helps translate texts into other languages.”
“Our AI-Generated Presenter Notes feature provides a detailed script for each slide, ensuring the user is equipped with concise and contextualized cues.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Lapp about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“One of our notable success stories is with Paciolan, a leader in ticketing, marketing, and fundraising for over 500 live entertainment organizations. Previously reliant on PowerPoint, Paciolan sought a more efficient and visually appealing solution and turned to Beautiful.ai. Paciolan found that Beautiful’s user-friendly platform significantly reduced deck creation time by 50-75%, empowering the team’s non-designers to create professional slides easily and independently. The Paciolan team found improvement in confidence, collaboration, and efficiency across the brand’s sales and marketing efforts after transitioning to Beautiful.ai.”
“Another customer story comes from Adweek. The Adweek Executive Mentees leveraged Beautiful.ai to power customer insights, share findings, and inspire team motivation in their five-part Motivation Monday series on Adweek.com. After conducting surveys for team motivation, the Mentees realized PowerPoint wasn’t the right platform to deliver the results for the project. They pivoted to Beautiful.ai, which saved them between 30-40% of design time that it might have taken in any other platform and effectively grabbed the attention of their audience, resulting in changed behaviors and prioritizing team motivation once and for all.”
Funding
When asking Lapp about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
Beautiful.ai’s total capital raised to date is over $16 million through series A+B funding. Existing investors include Shasta Ventures, Trinity Ventures and First Round Capital.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Lapp affirmed:
“Beautiful.ai stands out from competitors by focusing on a unique balance between creativity and practicality. Beautiful addresses the challenges faced by users who are non-designers, offering a tool that makes creating beautiful presentations accessible without a steep learning curve. Similar to how Slack didn’t kill your Outlook inbox, the whole ecosystem of presentations and how strategy is communicated within businesses is evolving with GenAI. Beautiful is not a PowerPoint killer—we’re not trying to emulate or replace PowerPoint. We’re making presentation creation faster, more powerful, and more collaborative. The ultimate goal for Beautiful.ai is to streamline workflows and boost team productivity, making it effortless to achieve top-notch presentation design so users can focus entirely on creating high-quality content.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Lapp concluded:
“We’re continuously exploring new ways to leverage AI to make presentations easier and more creative, allowing you to focus more on delivering impact. We also aim to enhance the overall functionality of our platform to ensure we’re serving our users in the best way possible. For example, we’re focusing on ‘smart theming’ to offer more complex branding options and improve customization. We’re also working to enhance Smart Slides, streamline collaboration tools, and refine both basic and advanced user features.”
