OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup whose software turns prompts, notes, and source documents into editable presentation decks, and moved founder Ahmed Beshry onto ChatGPT’s product team. Neither company disclosed a purchase price. NextSlide’s homepage, online for a little over a year, now shows nothing beyond Beshry’s farewell note, a sign of how quickly OpenAI folds a small team’s product into ChatGPT once a deal closes.
TechCrunch first reported the acquisition. The Decoder later filled in the timeline: Beshry said on LinkedIn that the news arrives “a few months late,” adding that the deal actually closed earlier this year, meaning OpenAI had been running NextSlide’s technology inside ChatGPT for months before either company said anything publicly.
This marks Beshry’s second time selling a company to a larger acquirer. He had previously started Caper AI, a smart-cart startup that Instacart bought in 2021 for $350 million. Build, sell, build again, sell again: that pattern fits a hiring approach OpenAI has leaned on all year, recruiting founders who already know how to ship a narrow product fast and pointing them at ChatGPT instead of leaving them to compete with it.
NextSlide is not an isolated purchase. OpenAI has folded in several other small teams in recent months, among them Context.ai, Crossing Minds, Roi, and Sky, along with the analytics company Statsig, which commanded the largest check in the group at $1.1 billion. In June it bought Ona, a Kiel-based German startup formerly called Gitpod, whose engineers now work on the Codex coding agent. The dollar figures vary, but the logic across all of these deals stays the same: OpenAI is buying finished product surfaces and the people who built them, not underlying technology it could not write on its own.
Presentations are a deliberate target, not a side project. OpenAI already ships an Excel-focused ChatGPT add-in, released in March, and a PowerPoint plugin that followed in May. The company had already tested agents able to produce spreadsheets and presentation decks straight inside the chat window, built to Microsoft’s file formats but not dependent on Microsoft’s apps, as far back as summer 2025. NextSlide hands that effort a team that spent a year on one problem: turning raw text into a deck a person would actually present. Absorbing it pushes ChatGPT further onto ground Microsoft has held since Office shipped, and it does so through a founder who has now built and sold two products aimed at replacing pieces of everyday office software.
None of these deals is individually large enough to require disclosure, and each adds one more reason a user might never need to leave ChatGPT for Google’s or Microsoft’s office suite. Teams building presentation, spreadsheet, or document tools on top of OpenAI’s API should treat that category as a live acquisition target now, not a durable niche to build a business around.
The Decoder reported this account of the deal on August 10, 2026, based on Ahmed Beshry’s LinkedIn post (TechCrunch first broke the story).
