OpenAI Quietly Acquired Presentation Startup NextSlide

OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a startup that turns prompts, notes, documents, and research into editable slide decks, folding the technology directly into ChatGPT. The deal closed earlier in 2026, but OpenAI only disclosed it months later, and the purchase price was not made public.

NextSlide's founder, Ahmed Beshry, has joined OpenAI's product team, where he is now working on ChatGPT itself. It is not his first exit: Beshry previously co-founded Caper AI, a smart-shopping-cart startup that Instacart bought for $350 million in 2021.

The acquisition slots neatly into a pattern OpenAI has been building for over a year. As early as summer 2025, the company was already testing chat-based agents capable of generating presentations and spreadsheets in formats compatible with Microsoft Office, but running independently of Microsoft's own apps.

That groundwork surfaced in shipped products soon after. OpenAI released a ChatGPT add-in for Microsoft Excel in March 2026, followed by a plugin that works inside PowerPoint itself in May 2026. NextSlide gives OpenAI dedicated, in-house talent and technology for the presentation side of that push, rather than relying solely on integrations with Microsoft's software.

Part of a broader shopping spree

NextSlide is one of several targeted acquisitions OpenAI has made to build out ChatGPT's productivity capabilities. The company also bought Ona, a German startup based in Kiel formerly known as Gitpod, whose team is now contributing to Codex, OpenAI's coding-focused product line.

On the analytics front, OpenAI's biggest recent purchase was Statsig, acquired for $1.1 billion, a figure that dwarfs the undisclosed NextSlide price tag and underscores how selectively OpenAI is spending on productivity tooling versus infrastructure.

Earlier deals for Sky, Roi, Context.ai, and Crossing Minds round out a broader acquisition strategy: rather than building every feature from scratch, OpenAI is absorbing small teams with narrow, proven expertise and rerouting them into ChatGPT and Codex.

The NextSlide deal signals where OpenAI wants ChatGPT to go next: fewer separate tools bolted onto Microsoft's ecosystem, more native document-generation capability owned outright. Whether that eventually challenges PowerPoint and Excel as standalone products, rather than merely plugging into them, remains an open question the current integrations don't yet answer.