Grant Lee studied mechanical engineering at Stanford University, earning a co-terminal master's degree in biomechanical engineering before pivoting toward business roles. He spent nearly a decade in finance and operations, including about five years at Optimizely (rising to interim CFO) and later as COO of ClearBrain, a Y Combinator-backed analytics startup acquired by Amplitude in March 2020. After that exit, Lee briefly worked as an independent consultant, where the repetitive, time-consuming work of building client presentations became the direct inspiration for Gamma.
In 2020, while living in London, Lee reached out to former Optimizely colleagues Jon Noronha and James Fox, and the three began building Gamma together, eventually relocating to a converted two-bedroom San Francisco apartment during the pandemic to work in person. Gamma set out to replace the rigid, 16:9-slide format of traditional presentation software with flexible "cards" that adapt to any length and device, and later layered in generative AI so users could create a full presentation, document, or webpage from a topic or outline. Under Lee's leadership, Gamma grew to tens of millions of users and roughly $100 million in annual recurring revenue with a team of about 50 people, reaching a reported $2.1 billion valuation after a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz in November 2025, and has described itself as profitable for more than a year as of that point.
