Perceptis AI Takes Consulting-Grade Presentations to the Gulf
The $3.6M startup, built by ex-McKinsey and ex-Apple talent, makes consulting-quality decks and has found early GCC traction.
Perceptis AI is a small startup with $3.6M in funding and a team shaped by McKinsey and Apple. It builds executive presentation software that produces the kind of decks expected from top consulting firms, and it is now aiming at the Gulf.
Founder Alibek Dostiyarov saw the problem while at McKinsey. People around him could think through complex issues, then wasted hours wrestling with presentation tools. He saw those workflows as labor-heavy and a natural fit for generative AI.
Plenty of AI presentation tools exist. Perceptis says few satisfy consultants. Its financing looks small next to rivals that have raised tens or hundreds of millions. Tests the company cites put it ahead: Analyst Academy’s live tests place it in front of better-funded competitors, Caliper Lab’s head-to-head comparison named it the winner, and Design Arena lists it among the leaders.
Perceptis says almost half its team comes from McKinsey, BCG, EY, and Deloitte. Engineers build the system; former consultants teach the AI what consulting-grade output looks like. CTO Yersultan Sapar, a former Apple Special Projects Group engineer, says the flood of text from large language models makes separating an executive-worthy insight from noise more valuable.
Japan surprised the company. Hundreds of users started building board presentations before Perceptis had a formal market strategy, and word of mouth carried adoption. A similar pattern is appearing in the GCC, where use has grown without a targeted launch. Dostiyarov calls this capability the highest-value market in the world, and Perceptis has spent six months working on the problem.
Arabic is the hard part. Dostiyarov says Arabic is where the category breaks, because right-to-left layout, bilingual decks, and regional nuance defeat most tools. For a sovereign fund or government body, a deck that does not work in Arabic is unusable. Perceptis invested in Arabic support before demand was obvious.
The commercial effect is real. A three-person consulting shop in Dubai can now produce the same consulting-grade artifact as a tier-one firm. That threatens firms that competed partly on the premium of a polished deck, and it helps independents who lacked the resources to look the part. Dostiyarov says the deck premium is gone; only the quality of thinking separates providers. He sees this as democratizing access to consulting, with growth coming from smaller, more specialized firms.
Perceptis describes its philosophy as "The Science and The Art of Executive Presentation." The founders say consulting and technology taught them different ways to organize information, and they try to combine comprehensive analysis with a clear point of view. A business deck exists to help someone make a decision, so the design pairs storytelling with visual form.
The Science and The Art of Executive Presentation.
Sapar says engineering investment goes into systems users may never see, because those systems decide whether the platform can serve ten thousand users or a million. The product uses zero-trust architecture, tenant isolation, minimal data retention, and no training on client data.
Perceptis is now entering the Middle East on purpose. Organic GCC adoption and heavy demand for high-stakes presentations make the region a fit, and consulting is shifting toward tools built around its own workflows. Dostiyarov says Perceptis is not fighting the presentation medium; it is perfecting it.
