Product groups typically have tons of display screen recordings and screenshots that find yourself unused. Video manufacturing utilizing these display screen recordings has been time-consuming and costly. That’s why two former Microsoft staff began to construct Lica, which is an AI software that simply creates tutorials and product movies out of screenshots and display screen recordings.
The startup was based in 2023 by Priyaa Kalyanaraman, who has labored as a product supervisor at Microsoft, Snap, and Waymo, and Purvanshi Mehta, who labored at Microsoft as a knowledge scientist and challenge supervisor.
Kalyanaraman — who labored on PowerPoint and Microsoft Designer, together with on including AI options to those merchandise — stated that she noticed a number of demand from enterprise customers so as to add AI assistants to enterprise creation.
“I needed to begin one thing, give on a regular basis folks design brokers that assist them talk higher. However I used to be on a visa, and it was difficult for me to begin my very own firm. I constructed a small demo in a hackathon and put it on Twitter (now X), the place Replit’s Amjad Masad noticed it and expressed curiosity,” Kalyanaraman stated.
Mehta was additionally constructing initiatives of her personal for content material personalization. A mutual pal launched them each, they usually determined to construct a software for video storytelling as a result of they felt instruments had been flashy and ineffective.
Lica has raised $4 million in a seed spherical led by Accel, with participation from SouthPark Commons, Village World, and angels like Replit CEO Amjad Masad, former a16z normal associate Balaji Srinivasan and Replit president Michele Catasta.
Aditya Agarwal, a managing associate at South Park Commons who has labored at corporations like Dropbox and Meta, stated historically, folks would construct a mix of paperwork and slides to get their concepts throughout. Alternatively, video improvement was costly and time-consuming. He believes Lica is plugging that hole.
“The overwhelming majority of the time, we might report utilizing a mix of paperwork and slides as a result of these are artifacts that anyone can produce in a company. To supply movies, we went to totally different businesses relying on the requirement. We wouldn’t produce a video for lots of communication internally or externally as a result of it wasn’t possible,” Agarwal stated.
The duo first began work on a mannequin that offers you the power to course of any form of multimodal enter and predict the sequence of motion and product-specific media in line with that. Nevertheless, the corporate determined to deal with video first, concentrating on prosumers and groups just like the product, buyer success, and gross sales.
The startup has a software that helps you construct a product video or an explainer out of a display screen recording. Lica can mechanically add transitions, background music and results. The corporate’s modifying software offers you the liberty so as to add some components, like textual content for narration manually. You may as well information the AI assistant by means of prompts to offer the video a particular voice, resembling “Make a tutorial-styled video in Gen-Z language.”
As soon as the video is generated, you can even edit components like voiceover tone, captions, language, fashion, and music by means of prompts.
“Lots of people don’t have the vocabulary of what they need out of a video. That results in a number of time-consuming iterations till they get the ultimate video. We’re providing you with an AI assistant who acts like your video producer and works shortly,” Kalyanaraman stated.
The founders famous that the software additionally understands design aesthetics nicely. In situations the place a consumer inputs uncommon design or coloration decisions, the software makes certain that the top product appears nice and never off-putting.
Mehta talked about that an AI assistant has two sorts of fashions: an orchestrator that places collectively totally different components of the presentation, together with selecting the perfect voice for the narration, and a format generator that takes care of how totally different components of display screen recording or textual content seem on the display screen. The corporate makes use of a mixture of open-source and close-source fashions for different components like audio era.
Lica at the moment has a free tier that lets you create 10 movies with a restrict of three minutes per video and three downloads monthly. You may pay $49 a month to generate limitless 10-minute movies and get 10 downloads together with entry to branded templates.
Whereas the present focus of the startup is on product and tutorial movies, within the upcoming months, Lica will look to tune its AI assistant for extra codecs of movies, resembling advertising, presentation, social media, and investor pitches.
Lica may not have direct opponents, however corporations and startups usually use something from a Zoom name to display screen recording to make a rudimentary video, with a software like Loom to shine it up. AI-centric startups like D-ID and Syenthesia have used avatars for tutorial movies or inside messaging.
Accel’s Sameer Gandhi believes the startup has right combination of high quality of the crew and its product strategy.
“Lica differentiates itself by combining superior AI capabilities with intuitive design in a single platform, permitting customers to take care of artistic management whereas benefiting from AI-assisted capabilities. Coupled with the crew’s generative AI and product improvement background, we consider they’re uniquely positioned to handle a key market want that different options have but to totally seize,” he instructed TechCrunch over e-mail.
