Startup Pitch Decks

Paramount Global is multinational media and entertainment conglomerate controlled by National Amusements, originally formed on December 4, 2019 as ViacomCBS through the merger of CBS and Viacom. The company rebranded to Paramount in 2022. In 2024, National Amusements held talks for a potential merger or acquisition of Paramount Global Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony Pictures, Apollo Global Management, and Skydance Media were all potential acquirers at one point. On June 3, Paramount reportedly agreed to a merger with Skydance Media, but talks fell apart and it was called off by June 11. The companies re-negotiated the deal, reached a preliminary agreement on July 2, 2024 for Skydance to acquire National Amusements and merge with Paramount. The deal will be structured so that a group of investors from Skydance will pay $2.4 billion in cash to purchase National Amusements, and Paramount Global will pay its Class A and Class B stockholders $4.5 billion in cash and shares. The deal is expected to close in September 2025. Skydance Productions was formed in 2006 by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, co-founder of the Oracle Corporation. In the Fall of 2009, Skydance and Paramount Pictures signed a five-year co-financing, production and distribution agreement. The two companies collaborated on franchises including Mission Impossible, Star Trek, Top Gun, Terminator, Jack Ryan, Transformers, and G.I. Joe.

SUMA Wealth, a 3-year-old fintech company that combines culturally relevant content and experiences with financial tools to help Latinos build wealth, raised $2.2 million in new funding. Sumas approach includes a lot of colorful, food-themed video and gaming content thats useful and funny. The company has seen 62 annual user growth. Suma also works with big banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo to reach Latino customers. The fintech platform is monetizing its partnerships with several leading brands, including dating app Match.com. The latest funding round was led by Radicle Impact, which was joined by Vamos Ventures, OVO fund, and the American Heart Association Impact fund. They joined previous backers Ulu Ventures, Female Founders Fund, and Chingona Ventures. The new round brings Sumas total funding to $8.8 million.

Eyebrows were raised after Paris-based AI startup Mistral raised 105m with no product, a mere four weeks after launching. While some welcomed the raise as a milestone for European tech, others saw it as sign of AI hype reaching a feverish peak.Most surprisingly, Mistral did not even use a pitch deck in the style of Rippling and Airbase, the company raised millions with a simple memo written in Google Docs.Their pitch memo focuses on two main selling points 1 that Europe has yet to see the appearance of a serious contender in building foundational models, and that Mistral will play a big role in this major geopolitical issue, and 2 embracing an open-source approach unlike OpenAIs black box system will make it easier for companies to build better, faster products. The company raised from notable investors including Lightspeed Ventures, French billionaire Xavier Niel and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

ElevenLabs is a voice AI research deployment company with a mission to make content universally accessible in any language voice. Their artificial intelligence platform creates realistic, versatile and contextually-aware AI audio, providing the ability to generate speech in hundreds of new and existing voices in over 20 languages. ElevenLabs was co-founded in 2022 by Piotr Dabkowski, an ex-Google machine learning engineer and Mati Staniszewski, an ex-Palantir deployment strategist. Both were raised in Poland, and their inspiration for founding ElevenLabs reportedly came from watching inadequately dubbed American films. In January 2023, ElevenLabs publicly released its beta platform after raising a $2M pre-seed round with this 11-slide deck, backed by Credo Ventures and Concept Ventures. In June of the same year, ElevenLabs raised a $19 million Series A funding round at a valuation of about $100 million, despite the company having no office and only 15 employees. By January 2024, ElevenLabs achieved unicorn status with a $1.1B valuation on their $80M Series A led by Andreesen Horowitz.

Learn.xyz is a generative AI learning start-up that aims to make learning more engaging and accessible. The app, available on iOS and Android, allows users to learn about any topic in almost any language, and it generates quick educational content called Curiosities from user questions. These Curiosities feature slides and quizzes. The company launched into closed beta in March 2023, and its early adopters created more than 60,000 Curiosities in just a couple of months. The Learn.xyz team has talent from LinkedIn, Stripe, Meta, Peerspace, and an octopus mascot called Lumi. Advisors include Kai Roemmelt, CEO and board member of e-learning giant Udacity, and Tanya Staples, former executive at LinkedIn Learning.

Spinach.io provides a meeting tool designed for engineering teams using agile methodology to run stand-up meetings online. Spinach helps remote teams be more effective, inclusive, and have more fun. The platform achieves this by increasing organisation, efficiency, and transparency in daily stand-ups over Zoom. It automates daily stand-ups by integrating with tools like Slack and Jira. The tool also captures action items and shares them through the appropriate channels. The company has raised multiple funding rounds including $2.75M in pre-seed funding as well as a $6 million seed round led by Atlassian Ventures with help from Y Combinator, Zoom Ventures, Maven Ventures, Tuesday Capital and Cardumen Capital.

Originally a Facebook group started during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 that people used to cook healthy meals for others nearby, HomeCooks has now evolved into a comprehensive marketplace for chefs. It facilitates the entire process for its chefs, from cooking to delivery, and offers over 200 meal options. The brand offers affordable, convenient, and accessible food options for eaters while giving food creators an easy and low-cost way to start selling. It handles all logistics and operations in a simple two-sided marketplace. HomeCooks raised approximately $7.16 million across four funding rounds. In the most recent round, in December 2023, the company secured $3.1 million in seed funding. Prior to this, HomeCooks had secured $3.24 million in April 2023 and $818,000 in December 2021,

Astek Diagnostics, established in 2020, is a Baltimore-based biotech company and a spinout of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The company is focused on developing precision diagnostic technology. Its lead product is the Jiddu Analyzer, designed for rapid detection of urinary tract infections and to determine antibiotic sensitivities within one hour. The company has successfully completed multiple funding rounds, including a $2 million early-stage venture capital round in 2023. This includes funding from Wexford SciTech Venture Fund, Iyana Capital, the Maryland Momentum Fund, and TEDCO. The company also closed a funding round at $850,000, which will be used toward applying for breakthrough designation with the FDA.

Fifth Dimension AI is a Generative AI company that amplifies exceptional professionals by automating boring, repetitive tasks and challenging their thinking. The first-of-its-kind AI assistant, Ellie, can read, review, analyse, fact-check, and create documents and spreadsheets in minutes instead of days. The companys recent UK growth paints a picture of the rapid adoption of genAI by professionals. In the last months of 2024, the company grew its customer base by 42, while usage doubled. Industry leaders such as Grainger, Canary Wharf Group, Allsop, and Hamptons have embraced Ellie, integrating her into their core operations. Fifth Dimension raised $2.83 million in a pre-seed round in 2023. In September 2024, the company secured an additional $7 million in seed funding.

Orange Charger aims to provide reliable and affordable EV charging solutions to everyone, regardless of where they live. Their primary focus is on offering right-sized charging solutions for multifamily properties, offices, and garages. Nicholas Johnson started Orange after losing a bet about using a Level 1 outlet to charge an EV for his commute. He developed a prototype that eventually became the basis for Orange Charger. The company offers several products Level 1 outlets are the Most scalable. Level 2 outlets offer the best power to cost ratio. These outlets supply enough power to add around 150 miles of range overnight. They are sold for $750 excluding installation. EVSE is for adding a lot of miles quickly. Orange EVSE comes in three options 40 amp, 60 amp, and 80 amp.

Based on the WireGuard protocol, Netmaker is the fastest and most configurable mesh VPN on the market, allowing companies to build distributed, dynamic, and secure networks instantly. Netmakers use cases span remote access, multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, edge computing, IoT, and Kubernetes. Founded in 2021 and based in Asheville, North Carolina, Netmaker is led by co-founders and IBM alums Alex Feiszli and Dillon Carns. The startup raised $2.3 million after graduating from Y Combinator in a round led by Lytical Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures and SaxeCap, with Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund and others also participating.

Scalestack is a go-to-market orchestration and agentic platform that helps enterprise teams to scale faster. Scalestacks platform is trusted by high-profile customers and enables scaled GTM operations. It is an all-in-one data enrichment, prioritisation, and activation platform. The companys platform empowers enterprise teams to scale faster. Co-founders Elio Narciso and Alessandro Prioni describe it as the Clay for the enterprise because of its dual-layered approach. Scalestack works with companies like MongoDB and Typeform, driving GTM efficiency through dynamic account profiling, lead prioritisation, and enriched insights.

Founded in 2023 by Leo Gasteen and Dr. Walid Mustapha, Deckmatch provides a suite of REST APIs that allows private market investors to automate workflows, including converting pitch decks into structured, enriched data. This data seamlessly integrates into CRM systems like Affinity, Attio, and Slack, enabling investors to quickly assess deals without time-consuming manual input. The company now serves nearly 30 clients across three continents and has achieved a six-figure annual recurring revenue, with a month-over-month growth rate of 40. DeckMatch says it is starting with VC firms and pitch decks but plans to expand its tech to other industries such as recruitment and procurement.

Oii.ai offers an AI-powered digital twin to optimize service, cost, and cash in supply chains. It aims to turn complexity into clarity and control with a digital twin that creates a transparent end-to-end supply chain. Optii, Oii.ais patent-pending software, integrates with existing planning infrastructure to automate network configuration, using AI and smart simulations to optimize network setup for service goals, cost minimisation, waste reduction, and revenue increase. The companys approach involves Recommendations to Apply to enable continuous supply chain optimisation, dynamic rebalancing, workflow optimisation, and probabilistic AI-driven models.

Tanbi is a play-to-earn game that blends environmental action with blockchain technology. Players cultivate plants from water drops, grow rare plant NFTs, and stake these NFTs to complete quests and gain resources. These resources can then be used to mint NFTs with real-world rewards, unlocking new in-game features, and minting trees. The company partners with environmental NGOs to translate virtual tree planting in the game into real-world tree planting. Players then receive a commemorative card noting their contribution.

SquadTrip is an automated payment solution for large and small groups, making booking and payments easy for group trips. The online platform allows users to save time managing group travel by creating trip sites, automating guest billing and keeping track of all traveller logistics from one place. The company was founded in 2022 by best friends Darrien Watson and Stevon Judd, and just 1 year later SquadTrip had generated $7 million in travel sales and 6,000 bookings.

Plantee is a company that offers an all-in-one smart indoor greenhouse designed to grow all plants using any soil substrate. The companys solution addresses customer needs for growing plants like Bonsai trees and epiphytic orchids indoors. The ultimate goal is to help people have thriving plants in their living and working spaces to improve well-being and mental health. Planter has raised $0.36M from VCs in pre-seed funding in 2021. The platform has market-validated their solution by raising $102K on Kickstarter, gathering 8K future customers in a private Facebook group, and building apps for iOS and Android. Planter targets the large market of 258 million indoor growers, with a focus on those who neglect their plants. They plan to reach a profitable $0.5B revenue by 2029.

The Plate was established in 2021 by Nadine Erk and Isabell Weiser as a culinary creation platform with its headquarters in Berlin. The goal was to help food creators with engagement strategies, such as building an educational offering or focusing on a specific niche. This advice helps creators improve their content and attract a larger audience. Creators could also build a subscription business on The Plate to receive a reliable monthly income. The Plate obtained $1.3 million in pre-seed funding in September 2021. Village Global, GE Ventures, and a few angel investors joined Atlantic FoodLabs in leading this round. The Plate shut down in February 2023, notwithstanding the original investment. The companys operations came to an end when it went through liquidation. At its height, The Plate had teams in Berlin and Manila and employed about 20 people.

Doolas Business-in-a-Box service for LLCs, which streamlines the process of company formation in the US. Their goal is to assist 1 billion founders in realizing their business dreams. Arjun Mahadevan and JP Pincheira founded doola in 2020. They used this 14-slide pitch deck to win HubSpots Million Dollar Pitch Competition, securing a Series A extension from HubSpot Ventures. Prior to this round, Doola raised $500k from Y-Combinator and Hustle Fund in 2020, as well as a seed round backed by several angels including HubSpot CEO, Dharmesh Shah.

Lago was co-founded in March 2021 by Anh-Tho Chuong and Raffi Sarkissian, both early employees at Qonto. Their vision was to build an open-source alternative to traditional payments billing platforms. They joined Y-Combinator a month later, and after five months of building released the private beta of their open-source billing software in August 2021. Lagos platform helps developers and finance teams manage their metering and billing needs. Some of Lagos clients include names like companies like AI startup Mistral and fintech Swan. Using this pitch deck, Lago secured a $7 million seed round from SignalFire after graduating from Y-Combinator.