Latest news with #MayureshPatole
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Meet Chronicle: The 'Cursor for Presentations' with 100k+ Waitlisted Users Launches Public Beta
San Francisco , June 03, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Presentations without PowerPoint: Chronicle's AI agent for presentations emerges from stealth mode with 100,000 waitlisted users and a mission to revolutionize how ideas are visualized and shared. Referred by many of its users as 'Cursor for Presentations', Chronicle's bold mission is to reinvent storytelling by having AI and world-class design co-create your next presentation. In a world where both traditional slide decks and first-generation AI presentation tools have disappointed with boring, powerless, and tasteless outputs, Chronicle promises a new reality where quality is the focus. Chronicle helps you craft stunning, impactful presentations in minutes, not hours. AI-Powered Storytelling Meets Refined TasteChronicle is more than just slides—it's an intelligent agent that collaborates with you on messaging, design execution, and narrative flow. Unlike traditional tools that merely put out generic AI generated content, Chronicle is like a brainstorming partner and master designer working on your narrative and visuals. Think Steve Jobs designing your presentation for introduces AI agent for presentations on a mission to revolutionize how ideas are visualized and shared. "Our early adopters are creating their best decks in just 10 minutes instead of 10 hours," says Mayuresh Patole, Chronicle's co-founder and CEO. "We built Chronicle not only to make stunning presentations at the speed of thought, more importantly, we want to eradicate bad quality presentations. That is a harder goal but we have made huge breakthroughs.'Chronicle founders: Tejas Gawande and Mayuresh Patole. One thing we realised early in the journey was that limiting the freedom on what layouts can be created makes most presentation tools too casual for real use cases. We took the hard route of building a free-form, realtime, smart canvas. It took us years but it makes all the difference. Chronicle handles the heavy lifting of conducting deep research, distilling key insights, and ensuring every element strengthens your narrative. This empowers anyone to create presentations with the depth and polish that typically requires years of expertise."In a world accustomed to subpar slides and forgettable visuals, we believe your ideas deserve better," says Mayuresh Patole. "The way you present can be the difference between winning and losing, between standing out and blending in. That's why Chronicle is built for those who refuse to settle for mediocrity." Chronicle's design philosophy flips the traditional presentation paradigm. By understanding what's needed to make your story visually compelling, it considers elements such as typography, spacing, visual hierarchy, and motion, all working seamlessly in the background. The result is a presentation that feels hand-crafted by a professional designer and storyteller. Chronicle aims to deliver on the decades-old promise of accessible, elevated storytelling by combining the speed of AI with a profound understanding of what makes presentations truly compelling. Chronicle gives you tools to guide focus – for the first time everMany tools are just about how your slides look, but truly extraordinary presentations hinge on your ability to direct audience attention—especially in a world of depleted attention spans. Chronicle considers this as part of its mission and brings a new level of interactivity and engagement by giving presenters superpowers like Peek and Deep Hover. These experiences allow users to manipulate focus like a pro: zoom in, highlight, isolate, or focus, ensuring that viewers stay engaged with exactly what matters most. "We've bottled up the storytelling and attention guidance secrets of great presenters and built them into Chronicle," says Mayuresh Patole. "Every template, layout, and widget has been designed to improve the audience experience and nudges creators to tell a story rather than simply dump information. It's like having a laser pointer on steroids—you guide attention with precision, making you an extraordinary presenter."100,000 Users Can't Wait: Public Beta Opens to Huge DemandChronicle's private beta has been running under the radar for six months, but word spread quickly in startup circles. Over 100,000 people — from founders perfecting their pitch decks to chiefs of staff preparing board meetings — signed up on the waitlist for early access. This feverish demand before a public launch is almost unheard of for a productivity app, signaling Chronicle has struck a nerve. 'We saw interest explode with zero marketing. It was all word-of-mouth from people who created something amazing with Chronicle and showed their teams,' Mayuresh notes. 'This response has been humbling, and it tells us how desperate people are for a better way to communicate ideas.' The timing couldn't be better. Since 2000, attention spans have reportedly shrunk by 33%, with most audiences tuning out after just ~50 seconds of attention in a typical presentation. Business teams are tired of spending over a month annually making slides. Chronicle's team believes these facts play into their hands. By combining brevity, interactivity, and visual punch, their AI-crafted stories aim to keep audiences engaged where old slides fail. Automating grunt work also gives countless hours back to employees and entrepreneurs to focus on real a USD 7.5 million seed round led by Accel and Square Peg in 2023, Chronicle has continued to refine its product with input from a select group of beta users. Many have swapped their existing presentation tools for Chronicle for critical meetings and speaking opportunities. The consensus: Chronicle makes presentations beautiful and enjoyable, words seldom associated with PowerPoint. Founders with a Vision (and Frustration)Chronicle was founded by two self-proclaimed "presentation nerds," CEO Mayuresh Patole and Tejas Gawande. Their journey began at university, where Mayuresh earned recognition for transforming standard PowerPoint into something unrecognizable. His classmates often approached after presentations to ask which specialized software he was using, not realizing it was PowerPoint beneath his creative hacks. "I was spending countless hours engineering solutions within traditional tools to achieve what should have been simple," says Mayuresh Patole, whose product obsession led him to envision a fundamentally new approach. After years crafting high-stakes presentations in both consulting and product leadership roles, he became convinced that presentation software needed complete reinvention. 'With recent advances in AI, we finally have the technology to build what I've been trying to hack together manually for years." Meanwhile, Tejas used his background in growth and social media to identify the shifting landscape of information consumption. "What worked in presentations a decade ago falls completely flat today," Tejas Gawande explains. "Modern audiences are trained by social media to expect information that's visual, scannable, and high-impact." Tejas recognized that the presentation problem wasn't technological, it was experiential. "Through hundreds of conversations, we kept hearing the same frustration: no matter how sophisticated our digital tools become, presentations remain stuck in the past. People don't just need faster slides, they need a completely new storytelling paradigm." Together, they set out to create a platform aimed at eliminating the PowerPoint pain they experienced is a web-based tool for creating presentations from interactive, media-rich widgets instead of static slides. Each widget is pre-engineered with world-class information design and motion built-in, so putting together a narrative is more like building an interactive webpage than assembling slides. The founders describe their approach as 'AI-augmented storytelling.' It's not about AI taking over the presentation – it's about creating an intelligent partner that actively contributes to the communication process. 'It won't present for you, but it will ensure what you present is drop-dead gorgeous and impactful' The platform is already being used to craft high-stakes board meeting briefs, investor pitch decks, and conference keynotes. In those settings, there's no room for error or fluff, and Chronicle's blend of AI-driven assistance and human oversight hits the sweet spot. The company's bet is that the future of presentations isn't one-click automation churning out soulless slides, but thoughtful collaboration between human creativity and AI efficiency. Try Chronicle – Your Next Presentation Will Never Be the SameToday, Chronicle enters public beta and is open for anyone to try. Chronicle welcomes everyone, from design novices to seasoned professionals, from startup founders to corporate executives, all united by the need to communicate powerfully without wrestling with complex software or hiring expensive design teams. Chronicle's free beta is available today at Simply sign up and try it for your next big presentation. Chronicle will handle the rest. With an army of eager users already onboard and a vision to make storytelling effortless, Chronicle aims to turn mundane presentations into memorable Chronicles. The era of AI-first presentations has arrived – and it might just make the slideshow a relic of the past. Over the course of their journey, the founders have attracted some of the most prominent thought leaders mapping out the future of work from organizations such as Apple, Google, Slack, Stripe, Superhuman, OnDeck, and Adobe. Chronicle is a fully remote team of 10, operating across the US, India, and Australia. Ends Media images can be found here. About ChronicleChronicle is the modern format of presentations to showcase your work. With expertly crafted design and storytelling, Chronicle takes the pressure off creating presentations, so you can focus on your ideas instead of getting lost in design. From pitch decks and proposals to team all-hands, Chronicle elevates every showcase to leave a lasting impact.. Find out more at CONTACT: For more information please contact the Chronicle press office via press@
Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Why Founders Who Keep Going Are The Real Start-Up Heroes
Chronicle co-founders Mayuresh Patole and Tejas Gawande Founders sometimes make it sound as if starting a business is easy. There are endless stories about entrepreneurs who had a moment of inspiration, raised plenty of capital and built valuable businesses, seemingly in a flash. But what about all the founders who spend years struggling to turn their visions into reality? One recent study found that getting a business off the ground is so stressful and exhausting that 72% of entrepreneurs are grappling with mental health issues. Mayuresh Patole, the founder of presentation software start-up Chronicle, thinks we should talk more readily about the grind of building a business. 'Everyone shares overnight success stories, but not many people talk honestly about the messy middle,' he says. And, by his own admission, the San Francisco-based businesss's journey to date has been rather messy. After Patole quit the consultancy BCG four years ago, he quickly raised money to get Chronicle off the ground – I last spoke to the company just after it had picked up $7.5 million of funding from Accel and Square Peg. But he felt compelled to scrap the first three iterations of his product because he didn't think they worked. He describes the original version of Chronicle as a 'total waste of time'; even on the third version, he 'got the technical foundations wrong'. The good news, Patole believes, is that perseverance pays off. Chronicle is today launching the latest version of its software in public beta, opening up the fourth generation of the product for anyone to try. He's confident people will like it – the private beta Chronicle has been running for the past six months has attracted 100,000 sign-ups. Users have ranged from students preparing presentations for university work to marketing executives at blue-chip enterprises including Nike, IBM and the large consulting firms. 'We've built something different and that has taken some time to get right,' Patole says. 'It feels like we're now finally at the start of our journey.' Co-founder Tejas Gawande agrees – and argues that Chronicle's timing is also spot on. 'What worked in presentations a decade ago falls completely flat today,' Tejas explains. 'Modern audiences are trained by social media to expect information that's visual, scannable and high-impact.' Chronicle's pitch is that its software enables people to build presentations that deliver those imperatives much more easily. It relies on 'widgets' as the building block for presentations, offering interactive and media-rich designs to help users get away from the traditional slide-based decks that are so widely used today. 'We use artificial intelligence to help you build really powerful presentations,' Patole says. 'It's like having an intelligent partner that actively contributes to the process.' Will the latest version of Chronicle have the impact that Patole hopes for? Despite his confidence, the jury is out. For one thing, the shadow of Microsoft's PowerPoint looms as large as ever – not everyone is a fan of the IT giant's presentation software, first launched almost 40 years ago, but it is ubiquitous; any new player in this space is confronted by this reality. Moreover, while Patole and Gawande have been struggling to perfect Chronicle, a significant number of other start-ups have also launched in the space. In February, for example, Accel, one of Chronicle's backers, put $3 million into an Indian start-up that offers AI-supported presentation software. Competitors in the market, including PitchAvatar, SlideDog, Prezi, CustomShow and ClearSlide, all have growing fanbases. Still, the market continues to grow, leaving the door open to start-ups that can convince users of their merits – and that they offer something different. Market research group ResearchandMarkets says the global presentation software market was worth $6.8 billion in 2023 but expects that to grow almost 15% a year to $15.7 billion by 2029. 'Key drivers include the proliferation of remote work and virtual collaboration, which have heightened the reliance on digital platforms for communication and information sharing,' the analyst says. Innovators in the sector believe a new approach to presentations is necessary because people now want to consume information in different ways – and because holding their attention is getting harder. Research published by King's College London found that 49% of people believe their attention spans have become shorter. Patole believes that Chronicle can take advantage of such trends – and that by having the patience to keep going back to the drawing board, the business has ended up with the right product. 'We've stayed true to our original mission to ensure that users never end up with a bad presentation,' he says. Not every start-up succeeds, but Patole believes Chronicle can prove that the tough times are worth it. 'The last four years have been a wild ride of learning,' he says.
