Breakout Startups #13- Pitch
The startup aiming to replace the Microsoft Powerpoint
If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory.” — Sam Altman, Former President at Y Combinator
In the 13th edition of Breakout Startups Memos, we are profiling Pitch, the company aiming to build “a presentation tool for the Slack generation.”.
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What is Pitch?
Pitch is building the next generation of collaboration presentation software which enables anyone to easily develop and share beautiful presentations.
Motivation
Pitch is a part of new crop of tools coming up in the productivity space focused on disrupting the decade old mechanisms in place through collaboration, design and smart integrations.
When we founded our company in January, Pitch really wasn’t much more than an idea. With Slack and Front transforming business communication, Airtable and Coda disrupting Excel, and Sketch and Framer on a mission to break Photoshop’s monopoly, we saw innovation and thoughtful design resetting expectations and reimagining the user experience of complex business software. Yet, even with this shift, presentation tools have not kept pace with technology; we believe there needs to be something new, different and substantially better.
Presentations have defined entire industries, architected how organisations function, how work itself is shaped and how information and knowledge is conveyed throughout markets and societies. They impact the lives and businesses of hundreds of millions of users every day, with billions of hours spent on crafting and delivering presentations. Major personal and economic decisions are based on presentation software. Yet existing tools are overly complex, bundled with other software, do not integrate with external data sources and have limited collaboration features.
The problem with Powerpoint,
“Broken fonts, compatibility issues, lack of versioning, no collaboration support… The list was long. And the biggest thing I’ve noticed is that people really struggled with designing good slides. They spend an enormous amount with moving boxes around a slide, rather than focusing on the content and the story. Microsoft is struggling with a lot of legacy — PowerPoint is now 32 years old, so it’s a quite a beast to maintain.” [Source]
Team
Christian Reber- Co-Founder and CEO
Adam Renklint- Co-Founder & CTO
Charlette Prevot- Co-Founder and Head of Operations
Eric Labod- Co-Founder & QA Engineer
Misha Karpenko- Co-founder & Software Engineer
Jan Martin- Co-Founder
Vanessa Stock- Co-Founder
Marvin Labod- Co-Founder & Software Engineer
Funding
- Pitch has raised a total of $52.7M in funding over 3 rounds.
- Yesterday, Pitch closed a $30M Series B, led by Thrive Capital.
- The company Series A of $19M was led by Index Ventures and an existing investor BlueYard.
- The company is also backed by the some of the major angel investors such as Instagram Founders Mike Kreiger and Kevin Systrom, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Framer CEO Koen Bok, and Superhuman Founder Rahul Vohra.
Notable Points
- The same team was behind Wunderlist, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 for $150M.
- After hearing the recent news of Microsoft shutting down Wunderlist, Christian Beber tweeted out to buy back the app from Microsoft.
Market Landscape
Productivity Space has been in the one of the hot sectors in 2019. One of the unifying themes of all the software coming up is the collaboration aspect of it.
There are countless number of companies attempting to reinvent lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, databases, forms and several other things.
For a perspective, we are in the unbundling phase of the productivity space.
Benedict Evans talks about it here:
This is best explained by this tweet.
We are seeing a new wave of startups aiming to replace “legacy software” in areas such as Design, Video, Coding, Presentations and several others.
For Presentations, we have a range of companies such as Prezi, and Slidebean competing with Pitch.
Despite being launched only in 2018, the company has made quite a buzz in the productivity space.
The product is currently in beta and will be rolled out of the next batch of users in the coming months.
On why the product is being rolled out slowly and steadily, Christian says,
Many tools we’re competing with were invented decades ago — for example, the first version of Powerpoint launched in 1987! So building Pitch fast and in the right way is a huge challenge, and involves many people, a lot of research, and most importantly, testing and iteration. We’re working closely with our first customers, like teams at Notion, Zoom, Slack or Superhuman. When we founded Pitch last year we knew that it’s going to take time to build a polished product — and we set ourselves a limit of 2 years to invite first customers. We’ve started inviting teams this August, and the feedback was very positive and useful, so I’m super happy to be able to start scaling invites now.[Source]
The team is 43 Member strong right now and they are looking to hire for 11 more roles in the upcoming time. Pitch is one of Europe’s few true product-centric companies breaking new ground in software for businesses. They are hiring remotely for Engineering Roles as well 😄
For jobs, checkout the Jobs at Pitch section below.
Jobs at Pitch
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