In a world where many eyes have glazed over at the thought of PowerPoint presentations, Prezi, a startup that lets you create presentations online with dynamic features like zooming and audio tracks, has made a splash. The company, started in Budapest, Hungary but now with offices also in San Francisco and Seoul, today is announcing that it has passed the 30 million mark for users who have used the platform to create presentations, adding some 1.5 million monthly at the moment and on track for 36 million by the end of this year. As a point of comparison, it was only in March of this year that the company passed the 20 million user mark.
CEO and co-founder Peter Arvai declines to say how many users are freemium, or give figures that can indicate engagement on the platform, but in total there are some 96 million Prezis in existence today.
In March, Prezi used the occasion to announce a long-awaited feature: audio for presentations. But today, the focus is less on new product announcements and more on global expansion. “Geographical expansion is really important,” Arvai says. While today its biggest markets are Europe and the U.S., the fastest growing are Asia and Latin America (the latter helped by Prezi launching Spanish and Portuguese versions earlier this year). Arvai predicts that longer term it will have many more users outside of the Western world than it does within it.
To prepare itself to pick up the pace even more, Prezi today is announcing three key hires in the U.S. to help do that: Tobey Fitch, its new head of HR, formerly led HR and strategy teams at Apple and Sprint. Scott Kabat, new CMO at Prezi, led the team that launched the Flip Video camcorder brand (now part of Cisco). And Karen Tang, new Head of Customer at Prezi, comes from Google, where she helped grow its Maps and Earth business. Arvai tells me there are another 25 positions going at the moment, with 170 working for the company today.
So what is it about Prezi that makes it attractive to users? It has a very simple interface and it's fun and easy to create presentations on it. But Arvai believes it is something else. “I'm realizing is that probably has to do with how our brains work,” he says. As a point of demonstration, he asked me to name my kitchen appliances, and correctly he predicted that I visualised my kitchen to do it. Turning concepts or questions into visual objects with spatial relationships, he says, “is what Prezi is good at.”
Prezi has raised some $15.5 million in funding to date from investors including Accel, Sunstone and the event organization TED. (It was TED's first-ever investment in a startup.) Arvai says that its cash flow positive at the moment and is not actively looking for another round. In fact, it's been cash flow positive since 2009, and still has that funding in the bank, “and we're adding to it.” The reason for this is because it has a healthy freemium business: while you can create Prezis for free online, there are two paid tiers, at $59 and $159 annually, that give users additional features like the ability to create presentations privately, a desktop version and more storage space after the free 100MB allowance.
Prezi is built out on the agile development principle - which effectively encourages a company to work on a number of projects at the same time, and nudge them along until they are ready to launch. This is Arvai's excuse for why he's not going to talk about new products today, although you can very much see areas where they may come next. One, for example, is on mobile: today the company offers iOS-based apps to make and consume Prezis, but there is to date no Android app. Another may be widgets to improve Prezi creation and consumption on other popular sites (because part of the fun with Prezi is that not only can you make presentations on it, but you can search and look at those for others - not unlike a Scribd for presentations).
Could this mean a stronger Prezi presence on social networks? Arvai's word choice seems to hint at this: “Our vision is to inspire people to share ideas in better ways, something bigger than a status update,” he says. “We need to become completely tech agnostic. In the long run we want the idea to come front and center, so we have a ton of work to do adopting Prezi to all kinds of platforms.”
