TL;DR: the story behind NOXI
- Who: I'm Aidar Akmaev, a product designer based in Abu Dhabi with more than ten years of designing digital products, from a financial super-app at Sber to AI products at MTS AI, AI71 and VentureOne.
- What: NOXI is a free AI presentation maker for decks that have to hold up in a real meeting: researched, sourced, built from tables, charts and timelines, and editable to the last text box.
- How: I started building it in 2025, alone, in the hours around my day job: evenings, early mornings and weekends, almost every day for more than a year.
- Surprise: the Arabic version, launched in spring 2026, found a large audience in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and across the Arab world, so right-to-left design is now a core focus.
- Signature feature: upload any deck made in your company's template, as a PDF or PPTX. NOXI learns its patterns and builds your own template from it, and every new deck comes out in that template.
- Today: more than 1,800 users, about 150–200 of them active, with no advertising. Every feature is free.
Who founded NOXI? NOXI (noxi.ai) was founded and built by Aidar Akmaev, a product designer based in Abu Dhabi with more than ten years of experience at companies including Sber, MTS AI, AI71 and VentureOne. He started NOXI in 2025 as a solo project and designs, codes and ships it himself, in his free time, almost every day.
About this article: this is a first-person founder story, written by me, the person who builds NOXI. Everything I describe about NOXI is how the product works today, in September 2026. User numbers are approximate and come from our own analytics. My career history is also on my LinkedIn profile.
NOXI at a glance
If you only need the facts, here they are. The rest of this article explains how each of them came about.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What it is | An AI presentation maker for professional, evidence-based decks |
| Founder | Aidar Akmaev, product designer |
| Where | Built in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates |
| Started | 2025; Arabic version in spring 2026 |
| Team | One person: design, front end, back end, AI and export engine |
| Price | Free: every feature, no watermark, no card |
| Languages | English and Arabic with full right-to-left design; decks in any language |
| AI models | Claude Opus and GPT-5.5 for content, Nano Banana Pro for images |
| Export | PowerPoint and PDF from NOXI's own engine, plus share links |
| Signature feature | Your own template, built by NOXI from any deck in your company's template (PDF or PPTX) |
| Users | 1,800+ users, about 150–200 active, no paid marketing |
Who I am: ten years of designing products people use every day
I'm a product designer. For more than ten years my job has been to take something complicated, whether a banking flow, a video-call platform or an AI model, and turn it into an interface people understand without reading a manual.
I started in Moscow in 2014 as the first dedicated designer at a B2B food-ordering platform. I then spent several years on digital products for national innovation programmes and redesigned a national education and reference platform at the Great Russian Encyclopedia. At Sber I worked on a financial super-app used by more than ten million people a month, and at MTS AI on a video-call and chatbot platform with millions of users.
In late 2023 I moved to Abu Dhabi. I led a design team at AI71, one of the UAE's AI companies, and since 2025 I've been a senior product designer at VentureOne, a venture studio that builds early-stage technology companies. Both jobs put me next to AI research teams every day, which taught me what these models are good at and where people get lost using them.
| Years | Company | What I worked on |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 – now | VentureOne, Abu Dhabi | Senior product designer, venture studio |
| 2023 – 2025 | AI71, Abu Dhabi | Design team lead, AI products |
| 2022 – 2023 | MTS AI, Moscow | Video calls and chatbots |
| 2022 | Sber, Moscow | Financial super-app |
| 2021 – 2022 | Great Russian Encyclopedia | National education platform |
| 2017 – 2021 | Association of Innovation Development | Innovation-programme products |
| 2014 – 2017 | Performance Food | B2B ordering platform |
I also write code. I can move from a Figma frame to a working React screen in the same afternoon, and that habit is the reason NOXI exists at all: I didn't need a team to start.
The problem: presentations look easy, and they aren't
Presentations are one of the most frequent and most important things knowledge workers make, and they are much harder than they look. I learned that by making a great many of them and by watching other people make theirs.
In every company I've worked in, the deck is where decisions happen. A product review, a budget request, an investor update, a lesson for students: the idea only moves forward if the slides make the case. And I kept seeing the same thing. Smart people, managers, venture builders, product managers and teachers, lost evenings to slides. Not to thinking, but to the mechanics: finding a number and its source, turning a paragraph into a table, aligning a timeline, fixing a layout that broke when one line got longer.
A good deck asks for three skills at once:
- An argument. What is the one point of each slide, and in what order do the points build a decision?
- Evidence. Which figures support it, where do they come from, and can the audience check them?
- Design. Which layout makes this particular point obvious: a comparison table, a funnel, a Gantt chart, a scorecard?
Very few people have all three, and nobody has the time to do all three well every week.
When AI slide tools arrived, they made the first draft much faster. Many of them are genuinely good at producing an attractive deck from a prompt. But when I tried to use AI for the decks I made at work, I kept rebuilding the result. I needed sources I could show a CFO, tables with real columns, charts built on real data and layouts that look like a strategy team made them. A pretty draft wasn't the hard part. The hard part was everything after it.
What I set out to build
My goal was simple to say and hard to build: give every person a way to make a high-level presentation, the kind a strategy team would make, whether it's for investors, a finance review or a class of students.
I wrote down five principles before I wrote any code, and they still decide what goes into the product:
- Design every slide for its content.The AI designs each slide individually instead of pouring text into a fixed template. A comparison becomes a table, a plan becomes a timeline, a funnel becomes a funnel.
- Show the evidence.NOXI researches the topic on the web and puts the source link for each figure on the slide itself, so the audience can check it. More on why in AI presentations with research citations.
- Use analytical layouts, not decoration.Strategy houses, funnels, Gantt charts, scorecards, comparison tables and twelve chart types built on real data. This is the vocabulary of consulting-style slides.
- Keep everything editable.Every element can be changed by hand or by chat, in NOXI and in the exported PowerPoint file.
- Make it free.A tool like this is only useful if people actually use it, so price shouldn't be the reason they don't.
How I build NOXI: a little, every day
I started NOXI in 2025, more than a year ago, and I build it in my free time: in the evenings after work, early in the morning before it, and at weekends. I've worked on it almost every day since, and I've missed very few.
The most important thing I've learned this year is to just keep building, even a little, every day. A product like this doesn't come from one big weekend. It comes from hundreds of small fixes: a table that wraps better, a timeline that mirrors correctly in Arabic, an export that keeps one more font.
I build it end to end, on my own:
- Design. NOXI's design system, every screen and the slide layouts themselves.
- Front end. React and TypeScript, including the drag-and-drop slide editor.
- Back end. Server functions on Supabase.
- AI. A multi-provider architecture, so each task uses the model that suits it: Claude Opus and GPT-5.5 for content, Nano Banana Pro for images.
- Export. My own PowerPoint and PDF engine, which I describe below.
Being a designer who can code changes how a product like this gets made. When a user tells me a layout feels wrong, I can redesign it and ship the fix the same day. I don't need a handoff, a ticket or a sprint.
What NOXI does today
After a year of daily work, NOXI covers the whole life of a deck: creating it, editing it, working on it with a team and delivering it as a file.
| Area | What you can do |
|---|---|
| Create | A deck from one prompt or from your files: PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel. Web research with sources on the slides. Twelve chart types on real data. Generated images, icons and company logos. |
| Edit | A full editor for text, charts, tables and images. An AI chat that changes one slide or the whole deck. Select any element, or draw right on the slide, to show what should change. |
| Present | Present mode with animations, and version history. |
| Team | Workspaces with folders and roles, invites by email or link, real-time co-editing, view-only or edit links. |
| Brand | Your company's own template, built from any deck in PDF or PPTX. Brand colours, fonts and logo. |
| Languages | English and Arabic with full right-to-left design, and decks in any language. Works on your phone. |
| Export | PowerPoint and PDF on NOXI's own engine, and share links. |
If you'd like to see the whole flow step by step, how to make an AI presentation walks through it, and PDF to presentation with AI covers building a deck from your own documents.
See NOXI in 75 seconds
This short film shows the core loop: describe an idea in one line, let NOXI build the deck, then edit it by drawing, selecting or asking.
| Time | What you see |
|---|---|
| 0:00 | The deadline problem: a deck due the same afternoon |
| 0:25 | Describing the idea in one line and editing the outline |
| 0:35 | NOXI's agents building the deck, slide by slide, with charts and sources |
| 0:45 | Draw on a slide, select an element or just ask in chat to change it |
| 1:00 | Making it yours: brand colours, fonts and logo |
The feature I'm proudest of: NOXI builds your own template
In Gamma and most AI presentation tools, you pick a template from their gallery of ready-made designs. NOXI works the other way round: you upload the template your company already uses, and NOXI builds your own template from it. I don't know of another AI presentation tool that does this.
Every company already has its template: the one the brand team issued, the one in last year's board pack, the one a client or a university requires. You don't need a special template file. Any ordinary presentation made in that template is enough, exported as a PDF or saved as a PPTX.
NOXI studies it and learns all of its patterns:
- colours and fonts
- where titles, subtitles and footers sit
- the grid and the margins
- how tables, charts and images are laid out
Then it assembles a ready template from those patterns. Every new deck you generate comes out in your company's template, as if your own design team had made it. For many people this is the difference between a nice AI deck and a deck they can actually send.
How it works in practice:
1. Upload a deck in your template
Any presentation made in your company's template, as a PDF or PPTX. It doesn't have to be the template file itself.
2. NOXI builds your template
It analyses the slides, learns the patterns and turns them into a working template in your account.
3. Generate in your template
Write a prompt or upload your material: a report, notes, a spreadsheet, photos. NOXI builds the deck in your template, with researched content and sources, and you edit it by chat or by hand.
Our own PowerPoint and PDF engine
NOXI exports PowerPoint and PDF files with an engine I built in-house, so the .pptx you download matches the slide you approved, and every text stays real, editable text.
The usual way to get a PowerPoint out of a web app is to send the slides through a third-party conversion service. NOXI worked like that at first too. The results depended on someone else's converter, and that's exactly where decks tend to break: shifted text boxes, substituted fonts, slides flattened into pictures you can't edit.
So I replaced the conversion services with my own engine. It rebuilds every slide as native PowerPoint objects:
- the text stays live and editable
- the fonts travel inside the file, including Arabic fonts, with letters connected and right-to-left intact
- images keep their original quality
- the file opens in PowerPoint without a repair prompt
It's one of the largest pieces of work in NOXI, and it now runs stably. It matters because the file you send is the file your client, your manager or your professor opens. It should look exactly like what you approved, and they should be able to edit it.
The Arabic version surprised me
About six months ago, in spring 2026, I built an Arabic version of NOXI. I honestly didn't know whether anyone would use it. They did: a large share of NOXI's audience now comes from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arabic-speaking countries.
That changed my priorities, and Arabic is now one of the areas I focus on most. Arabic presentations aren't English presentations with translated text. The whole layout has to flow from right to left, and the details are where most tools fail. Here's what I built specifically for Arabic speakers:
| Detail | What NOXI does |
|---|---|
| Right-to-left everywhere | The interface and the slides are designed RTL. Timelines, arrows, tables and process flows mirror, and each detail was designed for Arabic readers. |
| Arabic typography | Built-in Arabic fonts chosen for slides, with proper line height and weight. |
| Mixed text and numbers | Arabic sentences with English terms, brand names and figures stay in the right order. |
| Two languages, two decks | Separate Arabic and English versions of the same presentation, each designed for its direction. |
| PowerPoint with Arabic fonts | The exported .pptx embeds the Arabic fonts, so letters stay connected and the layout stays RTL on any computer. |
The export is the part I'm most careful about. In my experience, this is exactly where Arabic decks usually break. The slide looks right in the browser, then the letters come apart or the fonts are replaced once the file opens in PowerPoint. If you've ever seen that happen, this Arabic guide explains why, and the Arabic RTL presentation guide covers the design rules.
Why NOXI is free
NOXI is free because, right now, the most important thing to me is that people use it and that it's genuinely useful to them. Every feature is available at no cost: research, templates, the Arabic version, the team workspaces and the PowerPoint export. There's no watermark and no card.
A free product also gives me honest feedback. When nobody pays, the only reason people come back is that the product helped them. That makes retention the number I watch most closely. If you're comparing options, the best free AI presentation makers sets NOXI next to the alternatives.
Where NOXI is today
NOXI has grown without a single ad. More than 1,800 people have signed up, and about 150–200 use it actively. Growth has sped up in recent months, and retention is rising too.
Those numbers are small next to large companies, and I'm proud of them for exactly that reason. Every one of those users found NOXI on their own and chose to keep using it.
I built NOXI for the people I watched struggle with slides:
- managers preparing reviews and plans
- founders and venture builders preparing investor decks
- product managers and finance teams
- teachers preparing lessons
- students presenting their work
How I work with feedback
I read the feedback users send me, and much of NOXI's roadmap comes straight from it. When someone tells me where a deck didn't work for them, that's the next thing I fix.
My process is simple: collect the feedback, polish, ship, then ask again. For me the goal isn't the number of features. It's making something that is truly useful.
What's next for NOXI
Three things are at the top of my list:
- Generation quality. Stronger structure, better layouts for each kind of content and sharper research.
- PPTX and PDF quality. Keep raising the bar on the export engine, because the file is what people finally send.
- Template creation. Make it even easier to turn any existing deck or document into your personal template.
Alongside that, I'll keep investing in Arabic: more layouts designed for right-to-left reading and better support for mixed Arabic and English content.
Five things I've learned building NOXI
- Consistency beats intensity.An hour every day for a year builds more than any sprint. The compounding is real.
- AI needs design to be useful.Models can do remarkable things. The product's job is to make that feel obvious, so users never have to learn "prompting".
- Users will show you your market.I didn't plan for the Arabic-speaking audience. Once they showed up, the right move was to listen and go deep.
- Own the part that decides quality.Replacing third-party converters with my own export engine was a big job, and the one I'm happiest I did.
- Evidence builds trust.A figure with its source on the slide persuades more than a figure on its own, for audiences and for AI tools alike.
Related guides
- NOXI review: features, strengths and who it's for
- AI presentations in your own template
- AI presentations with research citations
- Best AI presentation makers in 2026
Frequently asked questions
- Who founded NOXI?
- NOXI was founded by Aidar Akmaev, a product designer based in Abu Dhabi with more than ten years of experience at companies including Sber, MTS AI, AI71 and VentureOne. He designs, codes and ships NOXI himself.
- When was NOXI started?
- Aidar Akmaev started building NOXI in 2025 and has worked on it almost every day since. The Arabic version launched in spring 2026.
- Where is NOXI based?
- NOXI is built in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where its founder lives and works. It's a web app, so it works anywhere, including on a phone.
- Is NOXI really free?
- Yes. Every feature is free, including web research with sources, your own templates, the Arabic version, team workspaces and PowerPoint and PDF export. There's no watermark and no card required.
- Is NOXI built by a team or one person?
- One person. Aidar Akmaev builds NOXI end to end: the design system, the React and TypeScript front end, the back end, the multi-provider AI architecture and the PowerPoint and PDF export engine.
- Which AI models does NOXI use?
- NOXI uses Claude Opus and GPT-5.5 for content and Nano Banana Pro for images, and picks the model that suits each task.
- Can NOXI make a presentation in my own template?
- Yes. Upload any presentation made in your company's template, as a PDF or PPTX. NOXI studies its patterns, builds your own template from them and generates every new deck in it, so you don't have to pick from a gallery of ready-made templates.
- Does NOXI support Arabic?
- Yes. NOXI has a full Arabic version with right-to-left design across the interface and slides, built-in Arabic fonts, correct mixed Arabic and English text, and PowerPoint export with Arabic fonts embedded so letters stay connected.
- Can I export NOXI presentations to PowerPoint?
- Yes. NOXI exports PowerPoint and PDF with its own engine. The .pptx matches the approved slide, the text stays editable, the fonts are embedded and images keep their original quality. You can also share a link.
- How many people use NOXI?
- As of September 2026, NOXI has more than 1,800 users, about 150–200 of them active. It has grown without any paid advertising.
Links
- NOXI — noxi.ai
- Aidar Akmaev on LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/iziai
- Aidar Akmaev on GitHub — github.com/iziaid
- NOXI in Arabic — قصة noxi بالعربية
Try NOXI free. Describe your idea or upload your files, upload a deck in your company's template so NOXI builds your own template, and get a researched deck with a PowerPoint file that looks exactly like your slides. If you have feedback, I read all of it.
