OpenAI Acquires NextSlide as the Startup's Team Joins Work on ChatGPT

OpenAI has acquired the startup NextSlide, which turns prompts, notes and documents into finished editable presentations, without disclosing the value of the deal, with the company's team joining work on developing ChatGPT.

NextSlide was founded in mid-2025, roughly a year before the acquisition, and its founder Ahmed Beshry confirmed the team's move to OpenAI, which makes the transaction primarily an acquisition of talent.

The deal forms part of a series of acquisitions through which the company is assembling a suite of office tools inside ChatGPT, preceded by transactions including hardware design firm io for $6.5 billion and analytics company Statsig for $1.1 billion, as well as personal finance applications.

In market terms, the move indicates that large laboratories have begun entering the application categories they previously only supplied with models, and the exit window is therefore narrowing for products built as a thin wrapper around models they do not own. The deal also places OpenAI in direct competition with Microsoft's PowerPoint, its largest investor, while EU and UK regulators continue to examine the implications of the partnership between the two.

Key terms explained:

Acqui-hire: Buying a startup mainly to bring in its team rather than its product.

Thin wrapper: A product that adds a simple interface on top of another company's AI model without deep proprietary technology.

Exit window: The period during which founders and investors can sell the company or list it at a worthwhile price.

Application layer: The software used by end users, running on top of the model and infrastructure layers.

Office suite: A set of productivity tools such as word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.