deck raises $600,000 from Qualcomm, Sabeer Bhatia and Amit Gupta

Bangalore-based startup, Deck App Technologies, today (17 December 2013) raised $600,000 seed round funding from leading technology investors, including Qualcomm Incorporated, acting through its venture capital investment arm, Qualcomm Ventures, Sabeer Bhatia (Co-founder, Hotmail.com) and Amit Gupta (Co-founder, InMobi). Their app, named deck, lets everyone – with or without design skills – create visually-appealing, robust presentations on any device.Unlike traditional presentation tools that are limited to PCs, deck was conceived as a mobile-first app for both Apple and Android devices in addition to a browser-based version that runs on any desktop and allows you to seamlessly synchronize your presentations across all devices.

Karthee Madasamy, Senior Director of Qualcomm Ventures, said he was excited by deck’s potential to transform personal productivity. “The transition from PCs to smartphones is opening up a significant opportunity for new startups to define a mobile-first user experience. As mobile devices continue to change the way people interact with the world around them, we are delighted to work with the deck team in creating innovative, design-led software and productivity solutions.”

The pain-point

The app automatically resizes presentations for the different screen sizes of various smartphones, tablets and PC browsers. It also takes the pain out of creating a good presentation for a technologically-challenged, design-deaf person. The app provides a minimalist editor that only requires you to pen your presentation as a series of points. For each point you can add supporting graphics, including images, charts and diagrams.

Sumanth Raghavendra, founder of Deck App Technologies, explains: deck frees you up from all design and formatting decisions and lets you focus on your content. Once you have crafted your story, you have just one design decision to make – selecting a presentation theme from a built-in library.

How is deck different from other presentation apps? The fundamental difference, Sumanth says, is that deck decouples design and content. This allows users to focus exclusively on content while the app does the heavy-lifting on the design side automatically. “deck prevents users from making common presentation mistakes like having too much text or too many bullet points by enforcing a set of presentation best practices at the tool level. You can only display and talk about one key message at a time – no bullet points!”

Wizards also guide you to choose the right chart or diagram to support your messages. In other words, once you have crafted your note, it only takes a single click for deck to convert your story into a slideshow.

Today onwards, deck is available globally. Users can sign up for a free account at www.deck.in