Gamma is an AI-powered platform that creates working presentations, documents, and visual content within seconds. Its primary use case involves converting documents—particularly large PDFs—into engaging presentations. The San Francisco based company was founded in 2020 and has grown to over 50 million users.

Limited by Existing PDF Parsing Solutions

In 2024, Gamma began receiving requests for a seamless way to convert PDFs into presentations. Co-founder and CPO Jon Noronha led the initiative, but found that most existing tools focused solely on text extraction, missing essential images and formatting. “We’re a multimedia product where people really want to capture detailed information, including visual elements like images and tables,” Noronha explained. As the first step in Gamma’s content pipeline, reliable PDF conversion was critical—accounting for a third of the platform’s total usage.

Unlocking High-Fidelity PDF Conversion with Datalab

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Gamma held off on launching a PDF conversion feature because existing tools couldn’t fully meet their needs. That changed when they discovered Datalab through a Twitter post from our CEO, Vik, who was sharing early prototypes and versions of his library. After Vik developed an API for Datalab, Gamma became one of its first customers.

Datalab provided a powerful solution that:

• Preserves text, images, and formatting from PDFs
• Handles large documents efficiently (100+ pages)
• Delivers unmatched throughput to support high volume (1,000,000+ PDFs per week)
• Integrates seamlessly into Gamma’s content pipeline
• Improves user experience and onboarding, which led to a 40% increase in conversion rates from PDF imports vs. pasted text

Watch Datalab's handwriting detection model in action!

Becoming a Universal Content Transformation Tool

Gamma aims to become a universal content transformation tool, turning any type of content into a concise, elegant presentation. “PDFs are such a major source of the world’s information, and legacy files are still the foundation for much of how the world operates,” said Jon Noronha. “We see Datalab as the bridge that helps us transform those old formats into something modern and easy to work with.”

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