Every founder hopes to launch the next unicorn startup. But billion-dollar businesses require millions of dollars in funding to scale. A pitch deck is a critical tool in a startup’s fundraising journey – the best pitch decks strike multi-million dollar deals, while the worst struggle to catch investors’ interest.
I’m sure you’ve already searched on Google and realized that hundreds of presentation templates and pitch deck outlines are available. However, the point is to stand out – not present a run-of-the-mill startup deck that falls into the crowd like a drop of water in the ocean. If you want to create a pitch deck that investors can’t help but pay attention to, the best way is to study examples from startups that raised millions of dollars.
Great pitch deck slides are well-thought and well-designed. You can’t toss them together in a rush. The best startup pitch decks combine science, persuasion, and art – using each slide as another stroke of paint on the canvas. Of course, you’ll find it challenging to create a winning pitch deck without some inspiration, so here are 30 of the best pitch decks we’ve seen over the years and why we love them!
1. Dropbox
Dropbox is a cloud storage service that lets you save files online and sync them to your devices. The platform makes it simple for users to share files and folders with others without attaching large attachments to an email. The team introduced the product at Y Combinator’s Demo Day in 2007. Since then, the company has acquired hundreds of millions of users and cemented itself as one of the most prominent unicorn startups.
The Dropbox team utilized its pitch deck to showcase its innovative product, explain its user engagement, and validate its business model. Investors quickly displayed interest, and Dropbox struck its first investor deal shortly after its Demo Day appearance.
The Pros of Dropbox’s Pitch Deck
Dropbox’s presentation may seem outdated compared to many modern pitch decks. It could use more graphic design, but the information is clear and presented in an easily digestible manner.
The founders cleverly used the slide titled “In a perfect world…” to connect readers to the problem by encouraging them to imagine what life could be like if those problems didn’t exist. At the time, consumers weren’t aware that one could have “your files available wherever you are, on any device.” In 2022, this value proposition probably doesn’t seem so unique. However, in 2007, forgetting your USB dongle at home meant all your files were inaccessible. Ultimately, Dropbox changed how the world stores and shares files, and its pitch deck validates this point.
Dropbox’s pitch deck tells a story and encourages engagement by asking questions like “Why Now?” and “Why Better?” The audience is likely asking themselves the same questions, and the deck takes them on a journey by answering their queries at the most impactful moment.
However, we love the no-fluff approach that Dropbox took with its slides. The text is large enough to read, and each slide gets straight to the point. Every word has a purpose, and every sentence is intentional.
Dropbox’s Lifetime Funding
The Dropbox team leveraged its pitch deck to raise a $1.2 million seed round in 2007. The company raised over $1.7 billion in funding over 11 rounds.
2. WeWork
WeWork is an American commercial real estate company that provides flexible shared workspaces for technology startups and other businesses. The company designs and builds physical and virtual shared spaces and offices for companies of all sizes.
It’s no secret that the company has suffered from a damaged reputation over the years, but that doesn’t take away from its ability to rank high in our best pitch decks list. Although the company had several pitch decks in its lifetime, its Series D presentation is an excellent example of showcasing traction and using it to explain future plans.
Why It’s On Our Best Pitch Decks List
Unlike DropBox, WeWork’s pitch deck is design-heavy with a modern aesthetic. Most slides utilize the same style – a bold title, a short text blurb, and a visual that supports the slide’s focus. In addition, the black and yellow color scheme is consistent across the entire presentation, making it appealing and engaging during a live pitch.
However, graphic design is only one component that we considered when creating our best pitch decks list. The most impressive part is the company’s ability to provide high-quality, valuable information with an easy-to-follow but comprehensive approach.
Instead of “warming up” the viewer, the team immediately gets to the meat of the presentation – traction. The Company Overview slide showcases their stats upfront, with impressive metrics that investors would find difficult to ignore. Of course, no investor can look away when a company presents statistics like 109% CAGR and revenues of $121.4 million.
The most appealing quality of WeWork’s pitch deck is its visual aesthetic. Every slide draws viewers in with easily digestible information showcased through charts, familiar logos, and authentic images of its locations and members. Some would say that a picture speaks a thousand words, and this is especially true when it comes to creating a pitch deck.
A Validated Hypothesis
The pitch deck tells the story of how work is shifting away from the office. Even before the pandemic, the founders realized that work-from-home was the future. Across multiple slides, WeWork showcases how millennials approach work differently, choosing freelance work and WFH options over the traditional office. By the way, they were right – today, more people work from their homes and shared office spaces than ever before.
Although its technology is a massive part of WeWork’s offering, the founders only gave the technology a single slide. Instead, they used the bulk of the pitch deck to showcase the problem and describe how they positioned the company to take advantage of an emerging market opportunity.
WeWork’s Total Funding
The founders raised $335 million in investor funding with its Series D pitch deck. In total, the company raised $4.45 billion over 11 rounds from 14 investors.
3. Copper Cow Coffee
It can be challenging to make coffee sound exciting when competing against hundreds of innovative tech startups. Copper Cow Coffee used its pitch deck to showcase its potential and display innovation in a market that has minimally advanced over the last several decades.
Copper Cow Coffee offers sustainably-sourced, all-natural coffee, sold in a kit that includes coffee and creamers. Although the company had humble beginnings, it has expanded rapidly and landed shelf space in major retail stores like Whole Foods, Walmart, H-E-B, and Sprouts. Today, Copper Cow experiences rapid growth, but its success began with a simple but impactful 11-slide pitch deck.
Why It’s An Awesome Pitch Deck
Entrepreneurs often overlook simplicity during investor pitches, but Copper Cow Coffee proved that less is more. For comparison’s sake, there are more words in this paragraph than in the company’s entire pitch deck. The team consolidated all the information into simple but powerful statements like “Craft coffee for anyone, anywhere.”
Unlike others on this list, the founders didn’t use complex graphs and charts to present information. Instead, they showcased the opportunity in a way that even a kindergartener could understand. Many brands would use line graphs and bar charts to display the market size, but Copper Cow used only a few words, “32 billion – American Coffee Industry.”
You might argue that this pitch deck is too minimal. However, when pitching an idea, you want the audience to pay attention to the presenter, not the slides. With a minimal approach, audiences can quickly grasp the concept without redirecting their attention to reading long paragraphs of text or unpacking complex data presented in charts and graphs.
Did Copper Cow Raise Funding?
Copper Cow Coffee participated in 500 Startups and raised over $1 million in seed funding. In total, the company has generated $11.5 million in investor funding.
4. Purple Go
Purple Go is an iPad-based platform that allows eyewear retailers to streamline online operations. Its all-in-one platform automates tasks throughout the sales process, freeing up staff members and maximizing operational efficiency. Although Purple Go serves a niche and uber-targeted audience, startups can learn a few lessons from their pitch deck.
Pitch Deck Highlights
Purple Go utilized a minimalist approach, telling its story with simple statements and highly-focused slides. Every pitch deck outline suggests adding a Problem slide, but Purple Go decided to forego this recommendation. Instead, it told a story of how several major brands adopted mobile-connected stores, how those stores earned 10x the revenue of traditional brick-and-mortar establishments, and how retailers now had fears of being outcompeted by tech-enabled competitors.
Purple Go makes our best pitch deck list because of how it tells the story with simple statements and slides. They don’t have a “problem” slide. Instead, they told a story that displays how several massive brands are opening mobile-connected stores, how those stores are earning 10x the revenue of traditional brick-and-mortar establishments, and how traditional retailers fear being swept under the rug by tech-enabled competitors.
The Solution slides don’t harp on every feature. Instead, each slide includes a single statement combined with a visual that displays how the product solves the market’s particular issue. Phrases like “Cut Time to Sale in Half” explains the value proposition without using bullet points or paragraphs. The pitch deck does not waste any space on less-impactful features but focuses on the specific functions that heighten its value proposition.
Furthermore, the team consolidated its Traction metrics with a few heavy-hitting statistics, such as “Pilot Store – $150k Annual Revenue.” By displaying these metrics, Purple Go gives the audience the what but leaves room so the presenter can explain the why, where, who, and how.
Did Purple Go Raise Funding?
Purple Go, which is still an early startup, raised $150,000 in seed funding from 500 Startups.
5. Blue Wire
Blue Wire is an audio-centric media company that hosts more than 120 podcasts with athletes, influencers, and professional sports franchises. The founders recognized an emerging opportunity in the market – sports radio had an established presence, but millennials preferred digitized media sources, like podcasts. The company succeeded in describing its offering and showcasing a growing need in the market only using nine pitch deck slides.
Why Do We Love This Investor Pitch Deck?
The company’s deck effectively showcases the shift in habits among the sports fan industry. The company accomplished this by comparing podcast and television subscriptions – showing how television loses 150,000 subscribers per month while podcasts have grown by more than 90 million.
The company explained its future potential through partner intent, describing its influencers’ combined follower numbers and displaying the logos of dozens of popular creators actively seeking to partner with the company. The team also validated its concept through undeniable data – 2.5 million listens over 11 months, with listeners doubling each month.
The Company Raised HOW MUCH!?
Using this pitch deck, the company raised $150,000 in pre-seed funding. To date, Blue Wire has raised $9.9 million in funding from angel investors and venture capitalists.
6. SnapChat
It seems like Snapchat has been around forever, but it launched just over a decade ago. In 2010, it was just a new social media platform hoping to strike a deal with a capital partner. The company had a great concept, a cult-like following, and clear feature differentiation. While all those things led to its domination as a social network, the pitch deck helped tremendously.
About Snapchat’s Startup Pitch Deck
Investor pitches aren’t the only use case for pitch decks. For example, Snapchat created an impactful sales deck to reach brands with its advertising and marketing services – and it is one that any founder can learn from when creating a pitch deck.
The Snapchat pitch deck sacrifices a title slide to get right to the value proposition. Its deck starts with a bold and confident statement, “Snapchat is the best way to reach 13 to 34-year-olds.” This statement immediately draws advertisers’ attention – especially those targeting young millennials. The risk of grabbing viewers’ attention with this approach is that after making the statement, you must prove it.
Snapchat immediately validates its opening statement on the next slide with a message that encompasses its saturation among its stated age group. The slide reads, “More than 60% of 13 to 34-year-old smartphone users are Snapchatters.” Then, it follows up with another intense metric – “2+ billion video views every day on Snapchat.”
What can you take away from Snapchat’s pitch deck? First, leave all the fluff behind. Instead, include strong statements that captivate your audience, but back those statements with accurate data and actual metrics.
The Sales Deck Impact
Snapchat’s sales deck isn’t relevant to its capital raise, but the company earns more than $2.62 billion in annual advertising revenue. The foundation of these sales came from their sales deck, which the team shared with advertising prospects early in its operation.
In case you wondered, the company has raised more than $4.9 billion in investor capital since its inception.
7. Peloton
The home fitness equipment industry constantly reinvents itself with new equipment and program offerings. Watch a few late-night infomercials, and you will realize that there is always some new product available to help you build your “dream body.”
However, in 2012, Peloton was an innovator in the fitness hardware and technology spaces, combining traditional equipment with modern tech solutions. Its primary products include internet-connected stationary bikes and treadmills that empower subscribers to participate in at-home classes through streaming media.
How Peloton Made Our Best Pitch Decks List
The Peloton team understood that its product wasn’t for everyone. Its pitch deck explains its awareness of its target customers and their psychographic and demographic qualities. The Customer slide outlines the exact details of its target customers – higher net worth consumers who are married and spend more than $150 per month on fitness. Notice that it’s not just fitness enthusiasts but those who earn a specific amount of money and have showcased a willingness to use their disposable income towards their fitness efforts.
Peloton’s investor deck proves the team’s awareness of the industry’s saturation and uses several slides to explain its competitive advantage over other brands. Statements like, “We are not a gimmicky fitness brand” separates them from laughable fitness products (I’m looking at you, Shake Weight… and you too, ab stimulators). The pitch deck refutes viewers’ objections immediately and removes the “bad product” stigma often associated with fitness products.
The Venture Capital Raise
Peleton raised $400,000 in seed funding and $3.5 million in a later round by creating one of the best Series A pitch decks we’ve ever seen. Throughout its lifetime, the company raised $1.9 billion, participated in six acquisitions, and launched an IPO in 2019.
8. Transferwise
The Transferwise (now called Wise) team founded the company in 2010. Wise, a money transfer platform, allows individuals to send money overseas quickly. The two founders conceptualized Transferwise after trying to remit money and realizing the high associated fees. The same problem they experienced impacted tens of millions of individuals worldwide, and they earned billions of dollars by launching a solution to this common challenge.
What Stands Out in Wise’s Pitch Deck?
We chose some of the prior investment pitch decks for this list based on their approaches to minimalism. But in our opinion, Wise has the perfect amount of text for each slide, providing enough information to understand the concept without overloading the presentation.
The How It Works slide showcases how easily users can send money using the platform. Traditional processes required individuals to visit a bank, fill out documents, and pay hefty fees to transfer money to overseas family and friends. With this slide, Transferwise explains its expedited remittance process in four simple steps.
How Much Did Wise Raise?
When it comes to the best seed pitch decks, Wise is one of our top choices. Using the deck, the company raised $1.3 million in seed funding from IA Ventures and Index Ventures. To date, the company has raised over $1.3 billion from investors.
9. Kickfolio
Kickfolio (now App.io) launched with an innovative marketing tool that allowed iOS applications to run in the browser using HTML5 technology. The technology helps brands promote their applications, find new users, and engage their audience with an interactive application demo.
What Can You Learn From This Pitch Deck?
This pitch deck is an excellent example of how a brand can use visuals to engage viewers with its story. Instead of explaining the solution with bullet points, the team uses product images to demonstrate its functionality. Furthermore, the team showcased its traction with a full-slide graph and a statement that explained user engagement – “2000+ signups in 6 weeks.”
Instead of hoping that investors would see the value it provided to customers, Kickfolio added testimonials from real users, making it clear that the solution impacted their lives.
How Much Capital Did They Raise?
With a world-class pitch deck, the founders raised $1.2 million in seed funding from investor partners.
10. Alan
Alan is a digital health insurance platform that revolutionizes health insurance by focusing on the user experience and providing health plans with the optimal price-quality ratio. The team initially established the business as a health insurance company for individuals and companies with top-level customer service and a competitive product.
Here’s Why We Love This Deck
To be clear, Alan’s pitch deck is more than double the length we’d recommend to our clients, but several qualities stand out.
First, the visual presentation is masterful. The branding is strong throughout the deck, utilizing the brand’s colors and maintaining a consistent theme that draws viewers into the presentation.
Alan’s deck begins with an elevator pitch, allowing the audience to understand its product offering immediately. Furthermore, the team included a slide that explained precisely why they were raising Series A funding – to expand in Europe and transition into a healthcare platform.
The Alan pitch deck lacks the minimalist approach we’ve seen in other presentations. Still, it gives just enough information to stand alone without a presenter or to support a human presenter during a live investor pitch.
Alan’s Series A Round
The company raised €23 million during its Series A round. In total, Alan raised over $558.2 million from angel investors and venture capital firms.
11. Castle
Castle is an innovative and process-shifting real estate solution for rental property owners. The startup operates under its slogan, “Put Your Properties on Autopilot!” Ultimately, Castle exists to help owners manage properties without the common landlord headaches. Since Castle serves a niche target market, likely, you’ve never heard of them. However, its pitch deck has several shining qualities that any founder can learn from.
What Can You Learn From Castle?
If you’re wondering what a pitch deck is or looking for a great pitch deck outline example, you should study Castle’s presentation.
The design is modern and exciting, utilizing a constant theme, graphics, product images, and icons. The icons highlight each point, bringing the viewers’ eyes directly to the most critical points of each slide.
Castle’s format is similar to most pitch deck templates but uses the structure to its advantage. The deck begins with an explanation of the problem – “Rental property owners want to make money without the work of being a landlord.” Furthermore, each slide enhances the overall story, leading to a robust and concise elevator pitch – “Automate landlording through software and on-demand labor.”
The best takeaway from Castle’s pitch deck is not simply presenting data but using the information to support the story and draw viewers’ attention.
Did Castle Raise Funding?
Since its inception, Castle has raised $3.3 million in seed funding from angel investors and venture capitalists.
12. Adpushup
Adpushup is a unique started that streamlines the process of optimizing ad placements. The solution enables publishers to improve ad performance by testing different ad placements, sizes, and types. While the design of this sample pitch deck is minimal, the information the team presented was critical to its funding success.
What We Like About Adpushup’s Slide Deck
Many entrepreneurs believe revenue is the only attractive metric, but Adpushup proved that other metrics are equally important. For example, the Traction slide validates its rapid growth, using impressions as a metric. By focusing on impressions, the team showed that while it hadn’t established revenue, there was already high demand within the market.
In addition to hypothetical users, the deck displays the solution’s impact through existing customer experiences. It includes a case study showing its product’s effectiveness in a real-world scenario. Social proof isn’t just gold for attracting potential customers; it also helps to sell your pitch to investors.
Did Adpushup Raise Seed Money?
Since its inception, Adpushup has raised approximately $632,000 from partnered investors.
13. LinkedIn
(Click image to view pitch deck)
The LinkedIn Series B pitch deck is ancient compared to others on our list. Still, it’s excellent study material for startups looking to develop a compelling investor pitch. LinkedIn launched during the social media craze, when many new social network platforms entered the market, and competition peaked. As a result, LinkedIn took a different approach and established a notable unique selling proposition by serving a professional audience. Although LinkedIn’s deck is extensive and text-heavy, it is an exceptional example of how a seed round pitch deck may differ from a later round deck.
The Takeaway for Social Media Startups
I should reiterate here that I don’t recommend that new startups use nearly as many slides as LinkedIn used in its pitch deck. For seed round startups, it’s way too much information. However, in later rounds, more robust decks are often necessary.
By its Series B round, LinkedIn had members, user engagement, referral metrics, case studies, and a revenue plan. The company had to consolidate all of these accomplishments into its slides. The LinkedIn team already had investors’ attention, so it wasn’t bound to the same restraints as a seed round startup. New startups have to earn the audience’s attention, and investors won’t give them the same attention as a later-stage startup with a worthy reputation.
In terms of content, LinkedIn’s pitch deck clearly defined its priority – establishing the network. Furthermore, it explained why this task is critical to achieving its growth objectives. Winning pitch decks identify how the team will utilize the investment to progress, scale, and expand the business and its success. The deck also showcased significant traction, showing how the company’s actual growth and user engagement far out-scaled projected metrics.
How Much Capital Did LinkedIn Raise?
LinkedIn raised $10 million from Greylock Partners during its Series B round. Over its lifetime, LinkedIn raised over $154.8 million in investor funding. The company grew its valuation to $352.8 million by the time it went public in 2011.
14. Canvas
Canvas provides a business solution that allows corporations and organizations to digitize their paper assets. The solution aims to eliminate paperwork by transitioning business processes through mobile applications. As one of the best startup decks, Canvas is a formidable example of how to use imagery to draw investor and audience attention.
What Caught Our Eye About This Investor Deck?
Canvas’s pitch deck begins by showing simple visuals that explain how the world has moved from analog to digital – books changed to eBooks, and CDs transitioned to MP3s. Now, according to Canvas, document storage will shift because of its solution. Immediately after, the company expresses the top five most significant issues faced by companies with paper-based processes. This setup is effective because it shows that its target audience faces specific challenges and that the timing is suitable for a transformative solution to enter the market.
We also appreciate Canvas’s Competitive Landscape slide. Instead of the basic format using a table and a slew of checkmarks, the pitch deck compares operational approaches – competitors focus on the “what,” while Canvas focuses on the “why.”
Canvas Raised How Much!?
Canvas’s pitch deck and investor pitch proved successful. As a result, the company raised $24.1 million in investor funding.
15. SickWeather
Sickweather is an app that analyzes data to predict and forecast population health. The app claims to accurately predict illness outbreaks 91% of the time and two weeks before the CDC on average. This sample pitch deck shows how important trust and credibility are – especially when your clients are some of the most respected brands in the world.
Sidenote: Sickweather became even more relevant after the pandemic. In April 2020, the company launched a COVID-19 scoring feature, becoming a leading predictor of which cities would experience coronavirus outbreaks.
Sickweather’s Pitch Deck Takeaway
The first thing that caught our attention was the addition of a video on one of the slides. Short videos can work well during a live pitch, and longer videos can help enhance pitches sent via email to potential investors.
Early in the deck, Sickweather lists previous and existing clients. The mentioned brands are well-known and credible, immediately giving the startup a high level of authority. Furthermore, the team used visual graphs to showcase impressive monthly recurring revenue growth, supporting its argument for rapidly rising projections and forecasts.
Lifetime Capital Raise
Sickweather has raised $2.6 million in investor funding since its inception.
16. Match Box (Tinder)
Match Box is the original name for the globally-recognized dating app, Tinder. Although many dating apps already existed, Tinder overtook the market by gamifying its platform – enabling individuals to swipe left or right to express interest or pass on another user. Match Box’s startup deck is an excellent example of balancing creativity and simplicity to generate investor interest.
What We Like About Match Box’s Pitch Deck
Match Box became Tinder, and Tinder went on to become the most successful dating app ever. However, success started with its pitch deck – and there are several reasons why the slides worked so well.
The slides are simple and minimalistic but use a real-world scenario to explain the problems daters face (fear of rejection) and the solution (Match Box). The pitch deck uses each slide to tell a story, and half of the deck simply includes screenshots of the application. It’s effective because it begins by introducing the customer, showcasing the user’s situation, presenting the solution, and showing how the solution solved the problem – similar to how a book or a movie would play out.
Finally, the last slide shows a transparent monetization model. Many dating apps struggled to generate revenue, but Match Box showed how it would utilize its customer base to create several income streams.
Match Box’s Lifetime Funding
In September 2016, Tinder received an investment of $1.4 million. Since then, the company has participated in three separate acquisitions.
17. Airbnb
If you’re an avid traveler, you’ve likely heard of (or used) Airbnb. Founded in 2008, Airbnb is a web service that allows people visiting other cities to book rooms from locals. Airbnb offers a classic marketplace-style platform. For travelers, it provides a streamlined process to book a room or a property, often offering more amenities than a hotel. In addition, property owners act as “hosts” on the marketplace, utilizing Airbnb to find short-term renters and generate income from their underutilized and vacant properties.
With a compelling pitch deck, Airbnb conveyed its advantages against the competition and expressed its unique market position.
The Upside of Airbnb’s Deck
First-time founders often focus so much on making their presentations visually appealing that they miss the essential qualities of a good pitch deck. Over-designing can cause distraction and pull your audiences’ focus to the wrong elements. As Steve Jobs once said, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Airbnb’s pitch deck is the perfect representation of effective simplicity. The team begins the pitch deck by explaining the customer problem (such as the price of hotels) and then uses statistics to prove the market potential. It defines the challenge entirely before beginning its introduction to the company’s product, service, and feature offering.
You may notice that the pitch deck pays very little attention to Airbnb’s software. Only one slide details the technology, while the most significant portion of the deck focuses on the market and the company’s plans to bring its product to consumers.
The founders represent the solution with only seven words – “Search By City. Review Listings. Book It!” Our team fell in love with this approach. Too often, entrepreneurs spend all their time talking about the product itself and don’t spend nearly enough time on the things necessary to investors, such as the strategy and the potential to generate a high ROI.
Airbnb – A Fundraising Success Story
Before this pitch deck, founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were inexperienced in fundraising. However, even with little experience, they closed a $600,000 seed round led by Sequoia Capital. In total, Airbnb raised $4.4 billion over several financing rounds.
Need more information? Check out our full breakdown of Airbnb’s pitch deck.
18. TeaLet
Tea is one of the world’s most popular commodities. However, inefficiencies exist in the supply chain process, slowing down the transfer of goods from farms to individuals. Furthermore, the market relies on middlemen to distribute products, which drives up prices for the final consumer. As a result, tea farmers have to deal with low-profit margins, and consumers lack access to the highest quality tea options.
TeaLet exists to streamline the supply chain. The company directly connects tea growers with wholesale buyers and retailers using blockchain technology and a web-based application. As a result, TeaLet has tripled the profits for tea farmers while reducing consumers’ prices for top-quality tea.
TeaLet’s founders sought to strike a deal with an investor, and their pitch deck set the stage for them to achieve this objective.
About TeaLet’s Killer Deck
TeaLet’s pitch deck doesn’t waste any time. Its pitch deck starts by displaying its most vital metric – We’ve sold 100,000 cups of tea in 20+ countries. A major traction statement like this grasps the audience’s attention from the beginning and immediately gives them credibility, even as an early-stage startup.
One of our favorite qualities of this pitch deck is the use of hard numbers. Sure, it gives you the what, which is the TeaLet app, but it focuses even heavier on the why and uses hard numbers to prove the market opportunity. By showcasing certain market activities, like the purchasing of a similar competitor by Starbucks, TeaLet creates the ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) amongst investors viewing their pitch.
Finally, there’s one thing that stands out against many other startup pitch decks – the design. While it is pretty design-heavy, its design choice dramatically adds to the messaging of the pitch deck instead of distracting from it.
How Much Funding Did TeaLet Raise?
With a great product and a well-thought pitch deck, TeaLet secured a $240k seed round from angel investors.
19. Moz (SEOmoz)
Moz, formally known as SEOmoz, is a SaaS company that provides a suite of inbound marketing and SEO tools. Gillian Muessig and SEO influencer Rand Fishkin launched Moz in 2004 and transitioned into SEO SaaS software in 2008.
By the end of 2017, Moz served more than 36,000 businesses worldwide. During this period, users crawled more than 168 million URLs and researched over 4.3 million keywords.
Building a leading software solution like Moz is no easy feat. Nevertheless, Moz’s founders created an impactful pitch deck that impressed investors and provided the capital needed to thrive and scale.
Why is Moz On Our Best Pitch Decks List?
Rand Fishkin has become the Michael Jackson of SEO. If you’re in the marketing industry, you’ve likely watched one of his many videos. However, he wasn’t born a world-known marketing expert. Moz’s pitch deck tells where the business started and how Rand (and his mother) built the company from inception without outside funding.
Moz used its slides to explain how the founders leverage free traffic through inbound marketing to build and expand the business. By showcasing its success with these methods, Moz validates its abilities since its software helps clients grow with the same techniques.
This pitch deck is longer than a standard startup pitch deck. However, when the team designed it, Moz had already completed an initial seed funding round and had significant traction. Therefore, in later series rounds, additional slides are often necessary to effectively showcase the growth of the business.
Did Moz Reach Its Funding Objectives?
A strong pitch deck and a validated product allowed Moz to raise $29.1 million over five funding rounds.
20. Front
Front is self-proclaimed as the “first inbox meant for teams.” Through its software, organizations can organize emails in a single place, route them to different team members, and manage discussions through a chatbox for maximized collaboration.
The company launched in 2013 and quickly grew its dominance in the corporate email sector. Today, Front serves over 5,000 businesses and has more than 100 employees.
Explaining Front’s Pitch Deck
The overall aesthetic of startup pitch decks has evolved over the years. Front incorporates several elements that improve its deck’s attractiveness – elements you likely won’t find in older pitch deck examples (like Facebook or LinkedIn’s deck).
For example, Front uses a plot graph to showcase how each competitor fits into the landscape. This graphic element is easy on the eyes and makes a complex concept simple to understand. The use of graphics continues with well-placed charts and graphs throughout the deck. Front showcased its traction and growth clearly while maintaining a minimal and clean appearance.
Front’s Fundraising Outcome
Front’s pitch deck enabled the company to reach its funding goals. To date, Front has raised over $79 million in venture funding.
21. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is an analytics provider that tracks and monitors web and mobile apps. Leveraging its toolset, app owners can compare new campaigns with A/B tests, execute user surveys, and build funnels.
The Pros of Mixpanel’s Pitch Deck
This presentation made it on our best pitch decks list because of its simplicity. Compared to other pitch decks, it is relatively minimal and utilizes text more than visuals. However, in a time when most pitch decks are over-designed, Mixpanel’s lack of graphic design stands out.
The founders created a great storyline within the deck that keeps viewers engaged. It begins by clearly stating the market’s problems in a single sentence. Then, using a few words, it explains the solution.
With a dark non-distracting background and white font, the message is clear. Instead of cluttered slides with non-connected visuals and many ideas, Mixpanel’s slides contain singular, focused, and notable concepts.
Mixpanel’s Funding Rounds
The company achieved its financing goals and raised $77 million over five investment rounds.
22. Facebook
(Click image to view pitch deck)
If you’re old enough to remember the launch of Facebook, you might recall that it first launched as “thefacebook.” Facebook is a social media platform that Mark Zuckerberg launched in 2004 – and unless you’ve lived under a rock or off the grid, you probably use it regularly today. The platform has billions of users and is now publicly traded with an estimated $140 billion valuation.
Pitch Deck Lessons for Social Media Startups
Since Facebook launched in the early 2000s, its pitch deck is now ancient. The startup landscape has significantly changed since Facebook’s early days. Gone are the days when pitch deck slides included entire text paragraphs.
However, Facebook’s pitch deck showcased the platform’s features, explained how they launched it, and expressed traction generated by spreading from one school to the next. In addition, Facebook added a media quote on several slides that further validated its impact and showcased its rapid traction.
Facebook’s Fundraising Success
Facebook raised over $1.3 billion before going public in 2012.
23. Buzzfeed
(Click image to view pitch deck)
BuzzFeed is an industry-leading internet media, news, and entertainment company that has brought new trends to digital journalism. John Peretti founded the company in New York in 2006 with a platform focused on viral content, including articles, lists, videos, and quizzes.
BuzzFeed exploded over its first few years and now hosts several brands, including Nifty, Goodful, As/Is, and Tasty. By 2018, BuzzFeed Video’s YouTube channel had generated more than 13.8 billion views and 17.2 million subscribers.
The Best Aspects of BuzzFeed’s Pitch Deck
BuzzFeed utilized screenshots of the platform throughout the deck, visually engaging viewers and investor audiences. The team used the designs to explain the solution and display important information, such as the revenue and business model.
In addition, the Competitive Analysis slide is exceptionally well-designed. Instead of showing how the company differentiates itself from competitors in the advertising and media sectors, it positions BuzzFeed as the perfect intersection between both industries.
BuzzFeed’s Lifetime Capital Raise
The BuzzFeed company raised over $496 million and has participated in five acquisitions since its inception.
24. Ooomf (Crew)
Ooomf launched in 2012 as an app discovery platform. Shortly after raising its first investment ($500,000), the company pivoted as a marketplace for freelancers working on various web and mobile projects.
Ooomf rebranded as Crew, the first marketplace where handpicked creators can work on the projects they love. Some of the world’s largest companies like Apple, Google, Uber, and Dropbox have hired freelancers on Ooomf’s marketplace.
Learning From Ooomf’s Pitch Deck
Ooomf made our best pitch decks list because we appreciated its ability to tell a story with minimal text. Each slide is well-designed and suggests a single point of focus. In addition, the company used graphics to display how simple it is to create a project on the platform and quotes from freelancers to showcase the potential for individuals seeking opportunities.
Ooomf’s Fundraising Activity
Ooomf (Crew) raised $9.9 million from 14 investors before participating in an acquisition by Dribbble.
25. Task.ly
Task.ly is a task management tool that helps professionals organize and manage their work lives. The app allows users to track project progress, collaborate with team members, and manage deadlines. The software aims to replace unorganized sticky notes, emails, and tracking docs with one simple-to-use platform.
Task.ly Pitch Deck Lessons
To be clear, we don’t necessarily love this pitch deck’s length. It’s 28 slides, more than double the recommended length for startup pitch decks. However, even with so many slides, a viewer can flick through the entire deck quickly since the company used minimal content to convey its messages.
Every slide contains a graphic, but the screenshots, images, and icons support the story and enhance the overall investor pitch. Furthermore, the designers condensed the text into short statements – most slides have less than six words.
Lifetime Capital Raise
The company hasn’t released any funding information, so we are unsure whether it raised capital and how much it raised.
26. Pendo
Pendo is a no-code platform that allows businesses to learn how customers behave while using a website or mobile application. By leveraging the solution, users can monitor page loads, clicks, focus points, and form submissions. Once the system collects enough data, it draws insights and makes suggestions to improve user engagement.
What Do We Love About Pendo’s Pitch Deck?
As we explained previously, Series B pitch decks are often significantly longer than early-stage ones. By this stage, the business has covered more ground and achieved more milestones. As a result, Series B businesses must represent more information on their slides.
Regarding design, Pendo’s presentation is one of the best pitch decks we’ve come across. Effective decks aren’t always pretty, but the team squeezed a tremendous amount of information into its slides without compromising design. Furthermore, the company used visuals wisely by inserting graphs and charts to explain concepts quickly instead of relying on text.
Pendo’s Fundraising Success
The team created several decks to raise $108.3 million over seven funding rounds. Furthermore, the company participated in two acquisitions.
27. Coinbase
Coinbase is a secure platform that makes it easy to exchange digital cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. As the largest cryptocurrency trading platform, the company earned over $1 billion in revenue in 2017. Since launching in 2012, it has scaled to offer cryptocurrency transactions and storage in over 190 countries.
Lessons from Coinbase’s Pitch Deck
The founders faced a significant hurdle when creating a pitch deck. In 2012, most investors were clueless about cryptocurrencies and the challenges faced by the small community of crypto investors. Therefore, the pitch deck had to educate investors on cryptocurrency and explain why the solution was necessary to the market.
Coinbase’s startup pitch deck explains why other solutions are ineffective (too difficult to use) while positioning the company as the ideal solution for its audience’s challenges. Furthermore, the pitch deck validated the existence of demand by showcasing rapid growth in user registrations, user engagement, and annual revenue.
Coinbase’s Fundraising History
Coinbase raised $547.3 million over nine funding rounds and participated in 12 acquisitions.
28. Contently
The Contently solution strives to address the three critical elements of content marketing: strategy, platform, and storytellers. The platform combines expert content strategy, a marketing services platform, and a global talent network to make content marketing more manageable than ever.
Today, the platform serves over 200 enterprise clients, hosts a community of 140,000 creatives (writers, filmmakers, and designers), and has paid over $40 million to its contractors.
Pros of Contently’s Pitch Deck
This Series B financing deck immediately presents impressive statistics explaining an existing market problem – brands fail to achieve their marketing objectives. The pitch deck uses screenshots of the platform to showcase its effectiveness and displays logos of current clients to validate its recent traction.
Contently’s Fundraising Activities
With an excellent pitch deck, the founders raised $19.3 million in capital over seven funding rounds.
29. Yaydoo
Yaydoo is a procurement automation platform that allows companies to streamline their purchasing processes. With Yaydoo, businesses can negotiate with several vendors simultaneously and with one click. Furthermore, the platform enables these companies to save on recurring purchases and reduce their team efforts.
Why Do We Love Yaydoo’s Pitch Deck?
Yaydoo effectively got its point across and validated the potential of its solution using only nine slides. The first slide is the most impressive, providing the fine details of how many sales the company achieved within two years and displaying logos of clients it served in the past. With significant social proof, it is easy to understand the company’s potential and ability to exceed customer expectations.
How Much Did Yaydoo Raise?
Yaydoo succeeded in raising seed funding. However, no public information is available expressing the amount of capital secured.
30. Backstartup
Backstartup is an all-in-one platform that allows startups and SMEs to manage their legal, accounting, and payroll processes easily. The founders launched Backstartup in Columbia in 2014, and the business now employs over 50 team members.
Lessons From Backstartup’s Pitch Deck
Backstartup’s investor pitch deck is another example of great design. The deck utilizes pops of color and well-designed visuals to engage the audience and pull them into the presentation. The deck begins with showcasing market size. Then, it goes into the product and explains the company’s traction.
In total, the pitch deck is only 11 slides. However, each slide effectively captures the details of the business with a consistent design theme that is visually appealing and easy on the eyes.
Backstartup’s Fundraising History
Backstartup held three funding rounds, raising a total of $905k throughout its lifetime.
Elements of a Fundable Pitch
Deck
Combined with an impressive presentation, a pitch deck is essential for successful fundraising. Great ideas (or budding startups) with sloppy presentations that leave key questions unanswered have little to no chance of persuading investors to part with their dollars. An average idea with a great pitch deck will have greater potential. The sweet spot of a pitch, however, is when you have an awesome and proven idea, a confident pitch, and a memorable startup pitch deck that sells.
When it comes to pitching, competition is thick. Startups use all the ammunition they have – number of users, monthly growth, revenue, feature concepts, prototypes, MVPs, usage feedback, and anything else that will help prove their case. The best pitch decks provide an organized presentation that allows the founders to present the right arguments, in the right order, with the right visual tools to create the maximum effect.
Pitch decks can help you raise serious capital if done right. Take a look at the infographic below to learn everything you need to know so you can create a pitch deck worthy of investment.
