Glisser closes $1M seed to spice up PowerPoints with interactivity

Glisser, a London-based startup on a mission to end tedious presentations by letting presenters include real-time polls and Q&As, has closed a $1 million seed round. Its web-based platform also supports other forms of audience engagement — such as enabling participants to save and share slides to social media.

Investors in Glisser’s seed are Downing Ventures and London Co-Investment Fund, along with some unnamed business angels. The financing will be used to spearhead a growth push in the US market, with a plan to open a base in New York, it said today.

Glisser launched its web-based platform back in 2015, and currently has 100 enterprise customers — naming the likes of Amex, Visa, Bloomberg and UBS among them, as well as some government departments. A total of around 10,000 presenters are signed up and using its software at this point.

The team was one of the startups graduating from Microsoft’s London Accelerator this summer, so no surprise it’s also focusing on integrating its presentation platform with Microsoft’s PowerPoint behemoth — releasing today what it calls an “add-in” for PowerPoint which lets users of the latter software tap directly into its interactive features.

“This allows presenters and event organisers the ability to upload and sync their presentations from within Powerpoint,” notes a spokesman.

Glisser features that users of PowerPoint can now tap into via the integration include polling, live audience Q&A, real-time slide sharing to audience devices, and audience analytics and feedback.

While Glisser’s own web product works by presenters uploading their slides to its cloud and getting a unique event URL — which they can then use during presentations to gather responses and feedback from the audience.