How Old-School PowerPoint Decks Pushed Hebbia To Buy A Fellow Startup
AI startup Hebbia's first acquisition is of FlashDocs, which generates PowerPoint presentations from a prompt. CEO George Sivulka tells Upstarts it solves a "last-mile" problem.
The Upshot
Startup Hebbia works with financial institutions and law firms to sic a swarm of AI agents on their documents, from SEC filings and earnings transcripts to internal memos and legal agreements, and extract intel that can save time, money, or both.
But founder George Sivulka then had to watch as those seemingly cutting edge inputs got copied and pasted back into PowerPoint.
For Hebbia, which raised $130 million at a $700 million valuation announced last July, that situation has posed a last-mile problem in providing real-world results for customers, which include financial institutions like KKR and MetLife, law firms like Fenwick and the U.S. Air Force.
“You’d find the insight, and then you’d go into the Microsoft Office suite, and it was painful,” Sivulka says.
So Hebbia is making its first acquisition today, bringing into the fold another smaller and newer startup, FlashDocs. Founded last year by Morten Bruun and Adam Khakhar, FlashDocs offers an API that generates slide decks – recently up to 10,000 slides per day – allowing users to prompt their way to decks they can then export as presentations in PowerPoint and Google Slides.