Chronicle AI Presentations Launches To 100,000 User Waitlist

Chronicle, the AI-powered presentation startup co-founded by Mayuresh Patole and Tejas Gawande, opened to the public last week after months in stealth and a waitlist that topped 100,000 users—including 10,000 businesses. Patole, a former management consultant and designer, describes Chronicle as “a modern format for storytelling,” that does much more than making the process faster. “Chronicle is quite different from PowerPoint in that the output is not slides at all. It is a completely different format,” he said. “You can create a really impactful and stunning presentation in minutes instead of hours. We also ensure that you cannot create a bad presentation on Chronicle. We want to bring good information design to people’s fingertips.”

Chronicle offers a free-form canvas and interactive widgets, with AI handling research, narrative flow, and design execution. “It won’t present for you, but it will ensure what you present is drop-dead gorgeous and impactful,” Patole said. The product also introduces features like Peek and Deep Hover, which let presenters zoom in, highlight, or isolate content to guide audience attention.

Users start by signing up at chroniclehq.com, where they can either begin with a blank canvas or generate a draft by pasting text, uploading a PDF, or sharing a link. Chronicle’s AI then analyzes the input, suggests an outline, and assembles a draft presentation made up of widgets—modular blocks for text, images, charts, and embedded media. Each widget is pre-engineered for design and motion, so even non-designers can build visually compelling, interactive presentations. Users can drag, drop, and rearrange widgets, swap layouts instantly, and use keyboard shortcuts for speed. The AI agent is always available to research, rewrite, or remix content, and the result is a presentation that scrolls more like a website than a traditional deck. When finished, users can share a link, present live, or export their work.

Patole’s decade-long obsession with presentations and Gawande’s background in social media and growth shapes the company’s approach. “Modern audiences are trained by social media to expect information that’s visual, scannable, and high-impact,” Gawande said. Chronicle’s goal is to make it impossible to create a bad deck, not just to speed up the process. “The problem is that it’s extremely hard to make great presentations but at the same time it’s extremely easy to make bad ones.”

Despite the dominance of PowerPoint and Canva, which both use AI in their own ways to assist deck production, the field is crowded with alternatives like Beautiful.ai, Prezi, Tome, Slidebean, Pitch, Decktopus, Visme, and Gamma, each offering their own take on AI-assisted design and storytelling. Chronicle’s most direct competitor is Gamma, which also uses AI to make presentations from text prompts. They claim to have fifty million users and $50 million in annual recurring revenue.

Chronicle’s waitlist of 100,000 users includes 10,000 businesses that were acquired organically. “We saw interest explode with zero marketing. It was all word-of-mouth from people who created something amazing with Chronicle and showed their teams,” Patole notes. “This response has been humbling, and it tells us how desperate people are for a better way to communicate ideas.”

Chronicle has raised $7.5 million in 2023 from Accel, Square Peg, and angels from Apple, Google, Meta, Slack, Stripe, and Adobe. Patole says the focus now is on building a world-class product and expanding access: “We want to find our early believers, our champions, our ambassadors, and then go very deep on solving their problems. The next step is really just increasing our beta and giving access to more and more people, and sharing what’s working out for them, and really finding those first few people who would just love the product.”

Chronicle plans to monetize with a freemium SaaS business model, offering free access for individuals and paid plans for teams and enterprises. As Patole puts it, “The way you present can be the difference between winning and losing, between standing out and blending in. That’s why Chronicle is built for those who refuse to settle for mediocrity.”