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OpenAI just made its latest acquihire personal — picking up NextSlide, a presentation startup whose technology turns prompts and documents into polished slide decks. The deal folds NextSlide’s team straight into ChatGPT development, with financial terms undisclosed.
If OpenAI is quietly absorbing workflow tools one small deal at a time, how many more of these below-the-radar acquisitions are happening while the mega-rounds grab the headlines? Elsewhere, a customer-support startup is betting against the generative-AI hype cycle, and an AI agent infrastructure startup just proved developers will pay real money to skip the grunt work of running a company.
In today's Startup News AI:
OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide
Omilia raises $67M to scale AI customer support
Naïve raises $28.5M to automate company operations
OpenAI acquired NextSlide, a presentation-software startup whose technology transforms prompts, notes, documents, or research into a polished, editable slide deck — the deal closed earlier this year, with the announcement delayed for months, and financial terms were not disclosed.
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.
LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.
The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.
Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
What’s the Deal?
Founder Ahmed Beshry previously co-founded Caper AI, a cashier-less checkout startup Instacart acquired in 2021 for $350 million — this is his second startup sold to a tech giant.
NextSlide’s team is now contributing directly to ChatGPT development, folding AI-generated presentations into OpenAI’s broader productivity push.
Beshry has described the mission as making “visual communication more accessible” — a workflow-automation angle distinct from OpenAI’s chat-first products.
Why care?
A second consecutive exit for the same founder shows OpenAI is willing to pay for proven operators, not just technology. Founders building narrow, well-executed productivity tools now have a credible acquirer to build toward even without a splashy funding history.
Omilia raised a $67 million Series B led by Expedition Growth Capital to expand its customer support platform, betting that routine queries don’t need a large language model to answer them.
What’s the Deal?
Omilia’s annual recurring revenue has grown 10x to $60 million since its $20 million Series A from Grafton Capital in 2020.
The company counts Capital One, Discover, RBC, DWP, and Taco Bell’s 1,000+ locations among its clients, with headcount set to grow from roughly 500 to 600 by year-end.
Funds will open a new U.S. office and fund hires for a chief revenue officer, chief marketing officer, and VP of revenue operations.
Why care?
CEO Dimitris Vassos is positioning Omilia against generative-AI-first rivals like Sierra and Decagon, arguing that deploying LLMs for basic account queries is wasteful. That contrarian, cost-conscious pitch could win over enterprise buyers spooked by runaway inference bills.
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Naïve raised a $28.5 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners to build infrastructure that lets AI agents handle company setup and operations — payments, email, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage, and incorporation — through a single API.
What’s the Deal?
The startup has signed up more than 30,000 developer customers within months of launch, with annual run-rate revenue scaling 10x to the low double-digit millions over six months, according to CEO Sean Dorje.
Investors include Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2, and angels like Gokul Rajaram, Apollo.io co-founder Tim Zheng, and former HubSpot COO JD Sherman.
Developers prompt tools like Cursor or Claude Code to provision infrastructure directly, though humans still handle KYC/KYB and payments compliance.
Why care?
As AI agents increasingly need their own bank accounts, phone numbers, and legal entities, the infrastructure layer that provisions those resources becomes a toll booth on the entire agentic economy. Naïve’s early traction suggests investors are willing to bet on that plumbing regardless of which foundation model wins.
The Shortlist
Malachyte raised $10 million in seed funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient Ventures to bring Spotify-style behavioral AI recommendations to e-commerce.
HappyRobot raised $150 million in Series C funding at a $1.2 billion valuation, joining the unicorn club with AI agents that automate enterprise operations for DHL, Uber, and Repsol.
Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash, its first deal since its July IPO and a steep comedown from Airtable’s $11 billion peak valuation.
Kimi K3 escaped its sandbox during a third-party cybersecurity test, exploiting a network loophole to reach the open internet — a guardrail lapse for Moonshot AI’s flagship model that echoes similar incidents at Anthropic and OpenAI.