Chronicle, a company building a modern format of presentations, has announced today that it has raised USD 7.5 million from Accel and Square Peg in its seed round. The company is reimagining how presentations are designed to effectively deliver impressive stories. The round also saw participation from angel investors from Apple, Google, Meta, Slack, Stripe, Superhuman, OnDeck, and Adobe among others. 

Founded by Mayuresh Patole and Tejas Gawande, Chronicle, with its world-class information design, is paving an entirely new way to make impactful, interactive presentations that are effortless to create. Creating presentations on Chronicle does not require hours of pixel-pushing and tweaking slides. It allows users to create their stories with ‘pre-designed blocks’. Chronicle delivers a dummy-proof creation experience - layouts are designed much like arranging widgets on one’s iPhone thus making it impossible to have a bad-looking Chronicle presentation.

The founders have spent the last decade helping thousands of people make presentations while working in product, growth, and management consulting roles.

Mayuresh Patole, co-founder and CEO at Chronicle, commented, “This started at university where I accidentally ended up teaching lecture halls full of students to build presentations because they thought I'd developed some new interactive format. I was actually spending hours hacking Powerpoint to deliver a novel, interactive and engaging format. Today, with the explosion of social media, remote work, and a plethora of modern design tools, the world is ready for a new way to tell stories. I’m so excited to empower users to create visually captivating stories in seconds or minutes, not hours.”

The founders realized significant changes were happening in how people narrate stories - both in the creation and consumption experiences.

Tejas Gawande, co-founder at Chronicle, added, “Social media has hijacked how people consume complex information. Attention spans have reduced by 33% since 2000 and have given rise to shorter formats across almost everything we consume. Today, most audiences stop paying attention to the presentation at the 10-minute mark. As younger generations have entered the workplace, this feeling of ‘death by Powerpoint ’has only grown more acute. Simply making tools that lead to faster creation of poorly designed slides with chartjunk and bad information design further aggravates this issue.”

Today, users are spending hours making bad presentations. Employees spend, on average, more than a month every year writing and finessing these presentations. Chronicle wants everyone to be able to share their story and be proud of the output they create. They also want to make storytelling a joyful experience. To do this they’re breaking the tyranny of the slide and replacing it with interactive blocks that work like magic.

On the fundraise, Mayuresh Patole added: “We are thrilled to welcome seasoned investors, such as Accel and SquarePeg, as essential partners on our path to growth. Our early adopters can use Chronicle to create some of the best decks in just 8 minutes instead of 8 hours. Eventually, we see Chronicle as the best way to anchor any meeting or discussion, in-person, remote, or asynchronous. It is a huge opportunity to impact millions of people who aren’t happy with how stories are told today, and we are incredibly excited about it.”

[Here is a preview of the product in action]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-

The founders used their platform to make their investor pitch deck that caught the eye of Accel’s Shekhar Kirani, and it was quickly evident how much impact a simple, well-designed, interactive format could create.

Shekhar Kirani, Partner at Accel, commented: “Chronicle is reimagining storytelling. The team is obsessed with fixing the problem and making the experience of crafting impactful stories not just bearable but joyful. Mayuresh and Tejas have put together a global, remote-first team that is fixated on solving the pressing issues that prevent people from delivering their best story, both sync and async. With its opinionated design and delightful experience, Chronicle has already started emerging as the choice of storytelling tool with modern ventures. We are thrilled to be a part of their mission and kick off a new generation of no-design tools.”

Paul Bassat, founder at Square Peg, said: “It is rare to find a founder who has such a special connection with the problem. Mayuresh is absolutely obsessed and uniquely skilled to craft a new storytelling medium. When he showed us what he means by ‘a new format ’it was immediately clear that the opportunity is huge and they are thinking about this very differently. We are thrilled to be a part of their mission.”

Chronicle is a fully remote team of 15, operating across the US, India, and Australia. They are currently in closed beta, rapidly iterating with their early adopters on the first version of their product that focuses on helping founders make pitch decks - a use case that is very close to the founders. They will soon be expanding to other internal and external storytelling use cases.