Startup Pitch Decks

Perplexity AI hopes to take on Google with its chatbot-style, AI-powered search engine. The company was founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. By March 2023, Perplexity stated it had reached 2 million monthly active users in the four months since publicly launching. As of Jan 2024, Perplexitys AI answer engine is used by about 10 million people every month. Perplexity AI has raising over $100M in funding from notable investors like Jeff Bezos, Tobias Lutke Amazon, Naval Ravikant AngelList, NVIDIA, and more, reaching a $520M valuation in their most recent Series B raise.

RAW is a dating app focused on creating a safer and more authentic environment for its users. It tackles issues such as catfishing, scams, toxicity, and ghosting that are prevalent on other dating apps. To ensure authenticity, RAW requires users to post real-time photos daily using both the back and front cameras. It employs phone verification. RAW also has a Respect Meter where users can rate each others communication styles, with profiles displaying flags indicating potential issues or positive attributes. Furthermore, RAW aims to combat ghosting by preventing users from starting new chats if they have too many unanswered conversations, encouraging engagement or disengagement with existing connections. RAW also has a feature called ExZoo, which allows users to turn their exes into animals and get a premium account upgrade.

Feel Therapeutics is a digital precision medicine company focused on mental health, aiming to reinvent the way we diagnose, manage, and care for mental health. They develop technology, including wearable devices and AI, to monitor and understand peoples emotional and mental health. The companys Feel Monitor is a wearable device with multiple sensors that continuously and passively monitor indicators related to mood, stress, sleep, and psychomotor activity. The data collected is used to provide personalised, data-driven interventions and support. Feel Therapeutics partners with pharmaceutical companies and contract research organisations to use their technology in clinical trials of neuropsychiatric drugs. The company also aims to obtain FDA approval for their digital therapeutic solutions for depression and anxiety. The founders of Feel Therapeutics, George Eleftheriou and Dr. Haris Tsirmpas, launched the company in 2015 with the goal of bringing objective measurement to mental health.

Megamod is a user-generated content platform designed for both creators with limited development expertise and players seeking massively multiplayer experiences. Founded by Alexey Kostarev and Dmitriy Semiriazhko, the platform aims to revolutionise game creation by providing easy-to-use tools that allow users to build their own worlds and interactive experiences. Megamod enables the creation of games 200 to 300 times more cost-effectively and faster than traditional development. The platform utilises voxel technology to ensure models and worlds are lightweight, and it incorporates AI to simplify game object programming. The company was launched in early 2023 and raised $1.9 million at a post-money valuation of $27 million.

Inefficient models drive up costs, slow down productivity and increase carbon emissions. Pruna AI has developed an optimization tool for compressing AI models so that they require less compute and energy. Users can run their model through Prunas optimization engine, which renders the AI model smaller, cheaper, and greener on any hardware platform. Some of the Pruna AIs customers include Meta, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, Scaleway, AWS, and PhotoRoom. The company has 2 Research hubs in Munich Paris and according to the startup, they have helped optimize more than 6500 public AI models. Pruna AI has announced that it has secured $6.5 million from EQT Ventures. Additional funding came from Daphni, Motier, and Kima, as well as high-profile angel investors, including Roxanne Varza, Herv Nivon, and Olivier Pomel.

Vizit is a cutting-edge AI company that helps brands engage their customers with content that truly converts. Using Vizits Visual AI Lenses, ecommerce professionals can use AI models that develop synthetic human preferences based on the behavioral characteristics of specific audience segments to help them deliver personalized, high-converting content. Vizits client roster boasts industry giants such as Unilever, Procter Gamble, Nestle, LOral, Mars. These industry giants use Vizits AI technology to assess and improve their visual content performance. The company has announced a $25 million Series B funding. This latest investment brings the companys total funding to over $40 million, positioning them as a leader in the visual content optimization space.

Danish startup Toddle was founded in 2022 by CEO Andreas Mller and CDO Kasper Svenning to change how we build software with a collaborative visual web app builder. Their goal was to create a platform that gives designers direct access to a live codebase through a visual editing interface, that enables them to make UI and UX changes that reflect immediately in the underlying code framework. Toddles open-source web app builder focuses on a component hierarchy for the frontend similar to coding languages like React, with adoption of data at the backend. The founders shared this pitch deck that Toddle used to raise a $4.3M seed round in 2024, without AI or other buzzwords. The round was led by Inventure, joined by PSV, Lifeline Ventures, and David Okuniev. Funding has been pouring into apps in the no-code development space, such as Framer and Bubble which raised $100M in 2021. In recent years, open source startups OSS building developer tools have seen an uptrend in VC interest, such as Posthog, InfluxData, and Gitpod.

Based in Las Vegas, TensorWave is a provider of cloud platform for AI applications that runs on chips designed by an Nvidia rival AMD. The company runs data centers that deploy thousands of GPUs that customers can access via the cloud to run AI workloads. TensorWave use AMDs MI300X accelerators specifically designed to deliver leadership performance for Generative AI workloads and HPC applications. The company began onboarding customers late this spring in preview. But its already generating $3 million in annual recurring revenue. According to co-founder Horotn, the company expects that this figure will reach $25 million by the end of the year an 8x leap. TensorWave is planning to increase the capacity to 20,000 MI300Xs to achieve this goal. On October 8, 2024, TensorWave announced the closing of a $43 million SAFE funding round. This round, led by Nexus VP, marks the largest SAFE funding for any Nevada-based startup to date. Other investors in this round include Maverick Capital, Translink Capital, Javelin Venture Partners, StartupNV, and AMD Ventures.

Nicole Wischoff raised $50M for Wischoff Ventures third fund with this 24-slide deck she shared on Twitter. The Nashville-based fund plans to write checks of $1 million or so into startups in areas like the new supply chain. This raise comes two years after Wischoff raised her second fund of $20 million in 2022 backed by Peter Thiel, a sizable jump from her first $5 million fund. Before becoming a solo GP, Wischoff was an early employee at lending platform Blend Labs, and part of the founding team at One Finance acquired by Walmart. Wischoff Ventures first major startup windfall was in 2022, when One was acquired by a Walmart-backed entity, Hazel. With this fresh funding, the firm will continue to focus mostly on enterprise companies in fintech, logistics and manufacturing.

Founded in 2017, Knime is headquartered in Zurich and has additional offices in Berlin and Austin, Texas. The startup sells an enterprise software platform for data analytics, reporting, and integration. Its main product, the KNIME Analytics Platform, is an open-source software program used by data scientists and analysts to analyze and visualize their companies data. Since 2017, Knime has grown revenue to 30M, at 30-40 per year and is now serving nearly 400 customers such as ASML, Audi, AMD, Lilly, Novartis, Bayer, Sanofi, Genentech, the FDA, PG, Mercedes-Benz, and others, with a team of 250 employees worldwide. Knime announced that it has raised $30 million from equity investor Invus to supercharge its AI offerings. This funding follows a prior investment from Invus in 2017, when the firm financed the startups $20 million Series A funding round.

AltC Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition corporation, announced its merger with Oklo Inc., a green fission power technology and nuclear fuel innovator. As a result of the merger, Oklo will transition from a private company to becoming publicly traded, giving investors an opportunity to invest in sustainable energy solutions. The transaction valued Oklo at a pre-money equity value of $850 million, providing an attractive entry point for AltCs shareholders that is roughly half the value of comparable clean energy go-public transactions. No existing Oklo shareholders received cash as part of the transaction, as all existing Oklo shareholders rolled all of their existing equity into the combined company. The merger was concluded in May 2024 and the comapny went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol OKLO. The stock price dropped 54 to $8.45 on its first trading day, bringing the total market cap down to $348M.

Tappa is a human-centric mobile technology company that empowers individuals to express themselves and engage more deeply with the brands they love. Tappa promotes brands through various channels, with their primary promotional method being their owned and operated keyboard products. The platforms branded keyboards are opened half a million times each month. The platforms total reach exceeds 500 million users, with clients including sports teams like Real Madrid and apps like Bottled and Benjamin. The company announced that it had raised $4.9 million in a seed round of funding led by Alicorn Venture Partners to expand its products and hire sales and tech talent. The startup plans to begin raising its Series A round early next year.

Founded in 2014, Creatios platform is used to automate workflows in customer relationship management scenarios. The company sells a variety of applications, from app design platforms to CRM tools, to clients and serves midsize to large enterprises. Creatio charges its clients a subscription fee, and its partners automate these processes for them. The company has around 750 partners, and its clients include large multinational companies in sectors such as retail, telecoms, pharma, and banking. The Boston-based company has announced it has raised a significant $200 million at a valuation of $1.2 billion in a round led by Sapphire Ventures with contributions from StepStone Group, Volition Capital, and Horizon Capital. The company had previously been bootstrapped for around seven years before cinching $68 million in funding in 2021.

Nanonets is an AI workflow automation startup that provides no code and AI-powered automation software products to large businesses. The company mainly focused on finance functions like accounts payable and reconciliation. In the past two years, Nanonets has experienced significant growth in its customer base, with over 34 of Global Fortune 500 companies utilizing its AI-based workflow automation platform across various sectors including Finance, Accounting, and Operations. The companys user base has witnessed a remarkable fourfold increase over the last 12 months. Nanonets used this pitch deck to raise a $29 million Series B round led by Accel, alongside existing investors like Elevation Capital and YCombinator. Previously, Nanonets shared their Series A pitch deck used to raise $10M after graduating YCombinator.

Lago is a Paris-based open-source billing startup that helps developers and finance teams with metering and billing needs. Lagos platform aims to offer a modular, scalable payments system for usage-based billing and metering. The company was co-founded in 2021 by a team of employees at Qonto, who envisioned building an open-source alternative to traditional payments billing. After securing notable clients like AI startup Mistral, Lago used this deck to raise a $15M Series A led by FirstMark, with follow-on investment from Y Combinator. In total, Lago raised $22M as of May 2024.

Zapata AI is a Boston-based AI and quantum startup that went public through SPAC merger with former IndyCar driver Michael Andrettis blank-check firm, Andretti Acquisition Corp. The company uses generative AI and quantum techniques to solve complex business problems, such as enriching business analytics with data and customizing LLMs for customer-specific challenges. The SPAC deal approved in February gave Zapata a pro-forma enterprise value of $331M at $10 per share when it went public in April 2024. Shares plunged 58 on the companys first trading day, slumping to $5.70 at close. Nearly 90 of $ZPTA market cap evaporated within a month, following an increasingly-common trend for SPAC stocks.

Using this investor memo, Rippling raised $200M in Series F financing in 2024 led by Coatue and signed agreements with investors to repurchase up to $590M of equity from current employees, former employees, and early investors. The round values the company at $13.5B compared to $11.25B when the company raised $500M a year prior in 2023. As of this funding, Rippling had raised a total of $1.4B from investors. Rippling first used an investor memo instead of a pitch deck when raising their $45M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins. The 2019 memo laid out their vision that businesses should have a single system for employee information across every department within the company. Five years later, that vision is alive and well in the companys Series F memo. Rippling has become an exemplar for compound startups, which go against the traditional VC adage that startups should focus on doing only one thing.

New York City-based Rogo specializes in generative AI solutions for financial institutions. Users can ask questions like what are big bank CEOs saying about inflation on recent earnings calls The platform returns an answer, which is informed by third-party data from sources, like the SEC, transcripts, and investor presentations, as well as a firms internal data. Since launching commercially in September, the startup has nabbed clients, including asset managers, hedge funds, investment banks, and private equity firms. Rogo charges a per-seat fee and has generated $1 million in revenue so far. Rogo has announced a $7 million seed round. The funding was spearheaded by AlleyCorp, a prominent venture capital firm, with significant contributions from Company Ventures, BoxGroup, and ScOp Ventures.

Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network. The company was founded by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, as well as Aaron Swartz, in 2005. As of October 2023, Reddit is the 18th most-visited website in the world. Reddit has raised multiple funding rounds from notable investors ie. $50M in 2014 from the likes of Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen and $300M in a 2019 round led by Tencent. Reddit achieved unicorn status in July 2017, raising $200 million for a $1.8 billion valuation. When Reddit debuted on the stock market in March 21, 2024 with the ticker symbol RDDT at $34 per share, which equates to a $6.4 billion valuation three years prior, the company raised a $700 million funding round led by Fidelity Investments at a valuation over $10 billion.

Founded in 2022, Recraft is a London-based startup that aims to vastly improve the quality of AI-generated images. The company aims to achieve this by building its own Foundation Model a pre-trained, deep-learning algorithm to generate consistent design elements. The business is focused on professional use cases, allowing companies to design and iterate their creations with their specific brand colors and logos. Without any marketing budget and relying on word-of-mouth referrals, Recraft has accrued more than 350,000 users. The company has announced 11 million in Series A funding in a round led by Khosla Ventures and former GitHub CEO, Nat Friedman, with participation from RTP Global, Abstract VC, Basis Set Ventures, Elad Gil and other angel investors.