Chronicle raises $7.5M seed round from Accel and Square Peg to reimagine presentations Accel and Square Peg along with a team of angels from Apple, Google, Meta, Slack, Stripe, Superhuman, OnDeck, and Adobe have backed Chronicle to build a modern format of presentations.
San Francisco, California
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February 21, 2023 09:00 AM Eastern Standard Time
The slide format was created in the 1980s to design overhead projector slides. 40 years later, the way we work has completely transformed but we are still stuck with this slide format. Not only is it extremely time consuming and tedious to make great presentations, the affordances of this format make it extremely easy to make bad presentations.
Today, Chronicle is announcing a new storytelling format to revolutionize storytelling for modern teams.
Founded by Mayuresh Patole and Tejas Gawande, Chronicle believes that this problem needs to be solved with world-class information design. They are making a completely new way to make impactful, interactive presentations that are effortless to create. Creating presentations on Chronicle is completely different from hours of pixel pushing. Instead of spending hours tweaking slides, Chronicle allows users to create with ‘pre-designed blocks’. These blocks are interactive and are designed with world-class information design in mind. This radically reduces the time required to create a story that is highly impactful. Chronicle wants to deliver a dummy-proof creation experience - layouts are created much like arranging widgets on your iPhone meaning it's impossible to make 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 kind of new interactive format. In reality, I was 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 that I can now bring that power to create visually stunning stories to anyone in seconds or minutes, not hours.”
The founders realized big changes were happening in how people were telling stories - both in the creation and consumption experiences. Tejas Gawande added: “Social media has completely 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 only further aggravates this issue.
Users are also spending hours making bad presentations. Employees spend, on average, more than a month every year writing and finessing these presentations. Mayuresh and Tejas were struck with a strong realization when they saw users move from conventional slide-based design tools to simpler formats that offer one core thing that users want - convenience. According to the founder, the problem is not that you cannot create great presentations with existing tools but rather that it is that the tools do not help in the process. Not only do existing tools and formats make it very difficult to deliver great presentations, they make it quite easy to make bad ones.
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.
Mayuresh Patole added: “Our early adopters are able to use Chronicle to create some of the best decks in just 8 minutes instead of 8 hours. Eventually, we see Chronicle being 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.”
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.”
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 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.
About Chronicle
Chronicle is a new format of presentations that lets you create impactful stories effortlessly. Chronicle is doing to presentations what Notion did to docs. We are not making a faster tool to make slides, we are fundamentally reimagining the format itself by taking away the design burden, making it interactive and engaging. Find out more and join the waitlist at Chronicle (chroniclehq.com)
Chronicle is led by a strong team of storytellers, and product and information design leaders. Mayuresh Patole co-founded Chronicle after witnessing a significant void in the way stories are created and shared. After being repeatedly asked at talks and events about how he made his presentations, he ran a workshop on effective presentations which was a surprise success. He went on to join BCG where he would spend the next 5 years surrounded by presentations again. Tejas Gawande is a product geek who brings his deep expertise in customer and go-to-market from working across the US and 10 APAC countries in eCommerce and management consulting. He also writes a product newsletter for thousands of subscribers. Mayuresh and Tejas met at university (IIT Bombay) and have known each other for a decade.
About Accel
Accel is a global venture capital firm that aims to be the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Accel has been operating in India since 2008, and its investments include companies like BookMyShow, BrowserStack, Flipkart, Freshworks, FalconX, Infra. Market, Chargebee, Clevertap, Cure Fit, Musigma, Moneyview, Mensa Brands, Myntra, Moglix, Ninjacart, Swiggy, Stanza Living, Urban Company, Zetwerk, and Zenoti, among many others.We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For more, visit www.accel.com
About Square Peg
Square Peg is a global investment firm on a mission to empower exceptional founders. Square Peg was founded in 2012 and has grown into a global investment firm with teams in Sydney, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, and Singapore. Square Peg invests in emerging technology companies across the internet economy. Since 2012, it has invested in over 50 companies including Canva, Fiverr, Stripe, Tomorrow, and Airwallex. For more, visit www.squarepegcap.com
Contact Details
Chronicle
Bilal Mahmood
+44 7714 007257
b.mahmood@stockwoodstrategy.com
Company Website
