Product teams frequently accumulate a plethora of screen recordings and screenshots that go unutilized. Traditionally, video production from these sources has been a time-consuming and costly endeavor. However, two former Microsoft employees took the initiative and founded Lica, an innovative AI tool that simplifies the process of creating tutorials and product videos from screenshots and screen recordings.

Founders and Their Backgrounds

Lica was established in 2023 by Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta. Kalyanaraman, with her extensive experience working as a product manager at Microsoft, Snap, and Waymo, and her work on products like PowerPoint and Microsoft Designer, including adding AI features, recognized the significant demand from business users for AI-assisted video creation. Mehta, who worked at Microsoft as a data scientist and project manager, was also engaged in building projects for content personalization. A mutual friend introduced them, and they saw an opportunity to build a more effective tool for video storytelling.

How Lica Works

Lica offers a powerful set of features. It has a tool that enables users to build product videos or explainers directly from screen recordings. The tool automatically adds transitions, background music, and effects, enhancing the visual appeal of the videos. Additionally, users have the freedom to add manual elements like text for narration. Through prompts, they can guide the AI assistant to give the video a specific voice, such as a Gen-Z language tutorial-style video. Once the video is generated, further edits can be made through prompts, including adjusting the voiceover tone, adding captions, changing the language and style, and selecting music.The founders emphasize that Lica understands design aesthetics well. Even when presented with unusual design or color choices, the tool ensures that the final product looks pleasant and not off-putting. The AI assistant consists of two models - an orchestrator that combines different parts of the presentation and selects the best narration voice, and a layout generator that manages the appearance of different screen recording or text elements on the screen. For other parts like audio generation, a mix of open-source and close-source models is used.

Free and Paid Tiers

Lica currently provides a free tier, allowing users to create 10 videos with a limit of 3 minutes per video and 3 downloads per month. For those who need more extensive capabilities, a monthly subscription of $49 offers unlimited 10-minute videos and 10 downloads, along with access to branded templates.

Future Expansion

While the current focus is on product and tutorial videos, in the coming months, Lica aims to expand its AI assistant to handle more formats of videos, such as marketing, presentation, social media, and investor pitches. Although it may not have direct competitors in the exact form, companies and startups often use a combination of tools like Zoom calls, screen recordings, and polishing tools like Loom. AI-centric startups like D-ID and Syenthesia have used avatars for tutorial videos or internal messaging.Accel's Sameer Gandhi believes that Lica stands out with its combination of a high-quality team and a product approach that combines advanced AI capabilities with intuitive design. It allows users to maintain creative control while benefiting from AI-assisted features, positioning it uniquely to address a key market need that other solutions have yet to fully capture.