Deck, a mobile-first app based out of India that allows users to create presentations on the fly, nabbed $600,000 in seed funding. TechCrunch said in its report that the seed round was led by Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia and saw the participation of Qualcomm Ventures and angel investors. According to Dec, proceeds of the funds will go towards hiring more personnel for its growing firm and to expand to international markets. The tech news site disclosed that the Bangalore-based startup had hired designers who had a hand in the mega-budget, CGI effects-laden film Avatar.
The tech news site said that Deck introducing itself to the market was an opportunistic move at best. TechCrunch said Microsoft Corp's PowerPoint had left enough room for potential entrepreneurs to launch ideas in the online presentation space. It quickly pointed out the growth of similar product-based startup Prezi, of which TechCrtunch said that the latter had launched an aggressive hiring strategy in order to hit its 36 million user base goal before the year end.
On another note, Deck founder Sumanth Raghavendra tells disclosed to TechCrunch that Qualcomm is essentially not an alien to the startup, as the former received the investment firm's $100,000 QPrize. Since its availability on both Android and iOS, the report said Deck had seen around 300,000 in downloads since launching out from beta in March this year.
Both Bhatia and Raghavendra expressed individually the competitive edge of the cloud-based presentation app. " Over the years, I have seen some pretty good quality software developed by them. It is unfortunate that their previous products were not positioned or marketed correctly. Deck really allows a novice user to express his/her creativity in a way that was not possible before," Bhatia said.
Raghavendra stated, "To enable this, we have removed all design distractions and formatting decisions from the user's purview. Each theme is unique and guaranteed to support your story with great graphics, animation and typography. Deck is targeted at people who don't have the time, inclination or ability to spend hours creating a beautiful presentation. So in a sense, deck is like a combination of a notepad and Prezi - the editor is similar to a simple note-taking app but the final output is as compelling and memorable as a Prezi,"
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