OpenAI has acquired the presentation startup NextSlide and integrated its team into the ChatGPT development. Founder Ahmed Beshry confirmed the move on August 8, 2026 – in his own words, with a delay of several months, as the deal had already been finalized earlier in the year. Both sides remain silent about the purchase price.
NextSlide transforms notes into finished slides
NextSlide built a tool that automatically converts bullet points, notes, documents, and research material into finished, editable presentation slides – designed for people without design experience. Beshry founded the company in mid-2025. Previously, he was a co-founder of the checkout startup Caper AI, which was acquired by Instacart in 2021. As TechCrunch reports, the entire NextSlide team will now work on ChatGPT features. This is a classic acqui-hire: the focus is on the employees, not necessarily the standalone product. His goal remains to make visual communication more accessible and to help more people express their ideas clearly, Beshry said in the announcement on the NextSlide page. It remains unclear whether the existing NextSlide application will continue as a standalone service or be fully integrated into ChatGPT. The acquisition fits into an existing pattern: on July 9, 2026, OpenAI had already introduced ChatGPT Work with its own presentation features, and a few weeks later, the direct ChatGPT sidebar in Microsoft PowerPoint followed. NextSlide now brings additional expertise in layout and slide design in-house.
Delayed disclosure raises doubts about transparency
The time gap between the contract signing and the announcement is striking: Beshry himself admitted that the news comes a few months too late. There has been no official statement from OpenAI regarding the deal; the only source of confirmation is Beshry’s announcement. According to an analysis by Implicator.ai, which relies on Crunchbase data, OpenAI has acquired at least 17 companies since 2023. Information about purchase price, team size, or the future fate of the acquired products is often missing – this number is not independently verified. As evidence of the pattern, Implicator cites the fintech startup Hiro Finance, which OpenAI reportedly acquired on April 13, 2026, and shut down about a week later. A similar fate befell the in-house browser ChatGPT Atlas, which OpenAI discontinued on August 9, 2026, after just nine months. For companies using productivity-related AI tools, this means: standalone products from smaller providers can disappear shortly after an acquisition. The underlying know-how often continues to live on in the parent company.
It will be crucial whether NextSlide’s technology becomes visible in ChatGPT in the coming months or gets lost in the broad functionality of the assistant. It also remains to be seen how OpenAI will handle the remaining 17 recent acquisitions, whose products have so far remained without official shutdown or continuation announcements. For competitors like Canva or Gamma, whose AI slide generators have so far competed with NextSlide, the acquisition is a signal that OpenAI does not want to leave the presentation market to its own ecosystem.
