• Chronicle transforms hour presentations are made
• It replaces slide decks and saves hours of preparation
• The startup raised $7.5 million led by Accel & Square Peg
• The platform is currently in beta mode

Presentation platform Chronicle has raised $7.5 million from angel investors who work for some of the biggest names in technology.

The raise was led by Accel and local VC Square Peg, along with a team of angels from Apple, Google, Meta, Slack, Stripe, Superhuman, OnDeck and Adobe.

The Indian-Australian-American software company says it does with presentations what Notion did with documents, competing with Powerpoint and co-challenger Canva to make presentations faster to compile, as well as more interactive and engaging.

Sydney-based CEO Mayuresh Patole met his co-founder Tejas Gawande at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and have known each other for a decade.

Patole was inspired to launch Chronicle after being repeatedly asked how he made his presentations and then a workplace on effective presentations that was a surprising success.

The pair have helped thousands of people create presentations over the past decade while working in product, growth, and management consulting roles.

“This started in college, where I accidentally taught lecture halls full of students to make presentations because they thought I had developed some kind of new interactive format,” says Patole.

“In reality, I spent hours hacking Powerpoint to deliver a new, interactive and engaging format. Today, with the explosion of social media, remote working and an abundance of modern design tools, the world is ready for a new way to tell stories. I am so excited that I can now harness that power to create visually stunning stories for everyone in seconds or minutes, not hours.”

Chronicle is not a faster slide creation tool, but a reimagining of presentations that users can create with “pre-designed blocks.”

These blocks are interactive and designed to reduce the time it takes to create a story with maximum impact. Layouts are created just like arranging widgets on an iPhone

Here’s an astonishing statistic: Employees spend on average more than a month a year writing and refining presentations. That means nearly 10% of their year is spent trying to capture their 15 minutes of fame at company gatherings.

Social media hijacks the attention

Gawande said the problem isn’t that you can’t make great presentations with existing tools, but rather that the tools don’t help the process.

“Existing tools and formats not only make it very difficult to give great presentations, they also make it very easy to make bad ones,” he said.

Chronicle in beta mode

“Social media has completely hijacked the way people consume complex information. Attention span has decreased 33% since 2000 and have led to shorter formats for almost everything we consume.”

The challenge, Gawande said, is that most audiences stop paying attention to the presentation at the 10 minutes marking.

“As younger generations have entered the workplace, this sense of ‘death by Powerpoint’ has only become more acute,” he said.

“Simply creating tools that lead to faster creation of poorly designed slides with chartjunk and poor information design only makes this problem worse.”

Patole said Chronicle’s early adopters were able to create some of the best decks in just 8 minutes instead of 8 hours.

“Ultimately, we see that Chronicle is the best way to anchor any meeting or discussion, whether in-person, remote or asynchronously,” he said.

“It’s a huge opportunity to impact millions of people who aren’t happy with how stories are told today and we’re incredibly excited about it.”

‘Obsessed’ founder

How the duo used Chronicle to build their pitch deck was enough to impress Accel’s Shekhar Kirani into investing.

“Chronicle reinvents storytelling. The team is obsessed with solving the problem and making the experience of creating impactful stories not only bearable, but also joyful,” he said.

“With its quirky design and delightful experience, Chronicle has already begun to emerge as the storytelling tool of choice for modern enterprises.”

Square Peg’s Paul Bassat said it’s rare to find a founder with a special connection to the problem they’re solving.

“Mayuresh is absolutely obsessed and uniquely skilled at creating a new story medium,” he said.

“When he showed us what he meant by ‘a new format’ it was immediately clear that the opportunity is huge and that they think very differently about this.”

Chronicle has a 15-person team that works entirely remotely and operates in the US, India and Australia.

They are currently in closed beta and are rapidly iterating with their early adopters on the first version of their product that focuses on helping founders create pitch decks – a use case very close to founders.

They will soon be extended to other use cases for internal and external storytelling.