The “Perfect” (Pre-) Series A Pitchdeck: An Investors Wishlist

We would like to address one topic some founders seem to struggle with and hope we can be of minor help: What information should you include and how should it be presented in a pitch deck you send to a potential investor? This question obviously highly depends on the current status and traction of your company and might also vary slightly by the investor you’re approaching. Also, it can only be answered on a very high level as companies, products and business models are too different to give exact advices. However, we like to keep it simple, so we made a few assumptions in the beginning to give good advices at the end.

Let’s assume your business is in the B2B SaaS space (which we love 😊). You had an intro to a VC through a friend (or sent a cold email, which is totally fine with us), but you didn’t talk to anybody from this VC yet. They asked you to send a pitch deck with the main information about your startup. You don’t have more information about the VC than those you get from its homepage.

Let’s further assume you want to raise a (Pre-) Series A financing round in about 3–6 months (don’t approach later as due diligences take time). Your business is running well, between 40–120k€ MRR, however sales is mainly done by you and you burn 50–100k€ per month. You would like to raise money for the next steps: Onboard the sales team and professionalize the sales process, strengthen your product, attack new markets and be prepared for an (international) Series A/B round in about 18 months (by coincidence this is also pretty much the Senovo sweet spot 😍). With these assumptions you reach out to different VCs you found over your network and through online research.

We believe there are some main topics every pitch deck should address by well-structured and easy to understand slides (10–20 slides max) which we will cover in the following. The order of the slides is regardless, it should just fit your storytelling — think about pitching it in a call or a meeting. However, a nice summary slide to start, with an eye catcher (great KPIs, impressive customers, promising growth, etc.) is something which will help you grab attention.

History

Give some general information on the history of your company. When did you found the…