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But founders are often so consumed with talking metrics, milestones achieved, or the capital they need that they sometimes forget to talk about their overarching vision for their startups. Selling a compelling vision is so critical that some investors weigh it more heavily than the pitch deck itself. It’s not about the slide deck.
I’m a female founder. I don’t have a technical co-founder. These are all of the things I heard from a founder that I recently backed. She was pitching for a pre-seed round of $400k. So what about all of the above statements—things that founders widely hold to be true barriers to fundraising? This isn’t surprising.
Know what the concerns are going to be ahead of time and weave them into your pitch: “Everyone who builds X runs into problem Y. Is it too hard to unseat entrenched incumbents? Ask specifically what terrible things about startups in this space the VC is trying to avoid. Are the consumers not deep-pocketed enough?
As entrepreneurs many people are driven to solve their personal issues right in front of them, which leads a disproportionate number of founders to focus on: music, bars, restaurants, photos, etc. Mission Driven I also am looking for founders that are on a personal mission to solve a big problem. But really it’s something I look for.
When I’m scanning a pitch deck I’m basically looking to put it into one of two buckets – Traditional or Different. Could be pinning their thesis on a category of technology or type of founder that isn’t yet understood by the investment community. of them, often as their first or second largest investor.
Today, we’re taking a closer look at the pitch deck it used to raise its pre-seed round. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that. . Well, that’s the world Five Flute wants to live in. The company raised a $1.2 Slides in this deck.
What most startup founders get wrong about financial projections. The pressures facing first-time founders are enormous. ” What most startup founders get wrong about financial projections. Pitch deck pro tips from a leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Senior Editor, TechCrunch+. yourprotagonist.
As a startup founder, you really need to understand how venture capital works. Startups often fall into the trap of writing off incumbents as too big to act, too clueless to know what customers want and too incompetent to deliver good products. That’s a convenient story, but it often isn’t completely true.
Human rights activist and Mos founder Amira Yahyaoui couldn’t afford to go to college, so when she first launched a platform to connect students to scholarships, the innovation felt full circle. She turned down multiple term sheets, and didn’t use a pitch deck. Amira Yahyaoui, the founder of Mos. That’s the goal.”.
Other individual investors in the round included former executives of Monzo and Stripe, Cuckoo’s pitch is that it has a simple broadband offering, suppling a single 67 Mb/s fibre deal on a monthly rolling contract with “no hidden fees,” it says. ” Cuckoo Internet closes seed funding to disrupt UK broadband market.
Pitching itself as a digital insurer aimed at millennials, Getsafe’s first product offers flexible home contents insurance, along with other “modules,” such as personal possessions cover (which insures possessions out of home) and accidental damage cover. Getsafe, the German insurtech, brings its contents insurance app to UK.
Brazil’s banking system is a massive market, and one ill-served by incumbents. Yet, it’s a startup with a CEO and co-founder who isn’t Brazilian, didn’t speak the local language of Portuguese, hadn’t started a company before, and didn’t really know a lot about banking to begin with. and for credit card indebtedness it was 272.42%.”
Entrepreneurs saw this as an opportunity to disrupt incumbents, and soon there were lofty claims that everything about the industry was about to change. Founderspitched carriers a tech-forward relationship with the customer, focusing on: With tech’s embrace, people were about to soon “love their insurance!”
Affirm — which was founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin — has built technology that can underwrite individual transactions, and once determining a customer is eligible, it can offer them the option to pay on a biweekly or monthly basis. What’s the best way to pitch you? Fundings and M&A. Seen on TechCrunch. techcrunch.com.
This doesn’t take anything away from the brilliant white male entrepreneurs that have built incredible companies, but it has made an equivalent crowd of Black founders almost nonexistent. Joseph Heller is CEO and founder of Supplied. I was mostly pitching white male VCs. Image Credits: Supplied. ” Read that again.
The funding, we should point out, is a also a measure of the faith investors have in repeat, successful founders. “We have seen in the past couple of years some of the incumbent networking vendors starting to adopt our model,” said Susan. web conferencing startup Kobrinsky founded for $121 million. .
When it comes to presentation creation, PowerPoint and Keynote remain the de facto tools by incumbent advantage. Besides Prezi, there’s Pitch , a deck creation suite from the founders of Wunderlist. But this hasn’t stopped startups from trying to disrupt the status quo.
Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, looks at the relationship between designers, developers, and AI, in conversation with a16z’s David George. [00:36] 4:03] Jambot demo [7:02] Human vs. AI creativity [13:37] Applying AI to design [14:31] Startups vs. incumbents Will AI replace designers? Will AI take all the design jobs?
Interestingly, Yuma “got started by accident,” according to founder Guillaume Luccisano. In any case, it’s a reasonably compelling sales pitch. “Baselit is [an] AI copilot for analytics,” co-founder Shubham Rana writes in the blog post announcing Baselit. Only time will tell.
San Francisco-based Global Founders Capital (GFC) led the round. Several African fintech founders such as Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, Ham Serunjogi and Odun Eweniyi are investors in the company too. Its pitch to customers is that while banks take weeks or months to give cards, Sudo Africa takes days. million in pre-seed funding.
The rather stealthy company was founded in late 2020 by Oliver Merkel (former Bain & Company partner who led the firm’s retail practice in Germany), Christoph Cordes (former co-CEO of home24 which IPO’d in 2018), and Julian Dames (former co-founder of Foodora, CMO at foodpanda and VP at Delivery Hero, and most recently at Softbank).
in average transaction fees, digital senders like NALA pitch themselves to customers as platforms with the best rates and lowest prices. Their collective bet is that their market will grow over time and eat into traditional incumbents’ share. With Africa being the most expensive region to send money to, with 10.6% and the E.U.,
There’s scores of competition, including incumbents like OpenAI and Anthropic. Several high-profile angel investors were also involved, including Scott Banister, one of the co-founders of PayPal, and Jeff Hammerbacher, a Cloudera founding employee. According to one source, generative AI startups raised $1.7
Founders/Team: How do the founders know each other? What kinds of moves are the incumbents making and how they change the market? Pitch-it-myself test : I stop a few partners in the office and give them the pitch to test their reactions. Below is my general outline for a typical diligence process. First meeting.
CEO and founder Nitin Jayakrishnan says that the new capital will be put toward expanding Pando’s global sales, marketing and delivery capabilities. This, along with the platform’s emphasis on no-code capabilities, differentiates Pando from incumbents like SAP, Oracle, Blue Yonder and E2Open, Jayakrishnan asserts.
Europe is perhaps an obvious first step for Neeva’s inaugural expansion plans, owing to the slew of antitrust complaints currently faced by the mighty incumbent Google, with legislators targeting everything from e-commerce (Google Shopping) and Android to its dominance of the online ad market. France and Germany. ” Privacy push.
Fortunately, co-founders Steven Henderson and Mike Carter have backgrounds in shipping and shipbuilding and are excited to jump in. ” pitch went over quite well. BEV wasn’t alone, though; Founders Fund, McKinley Capital and previous investors also contributed. ” Surprisingly, this “want to give us a boat?”
There’s an audio-only version of TechCrunch Live hosted by Matt that features founders and investors discussing successful pitch decks. Extras: Hana Mohan’s Twitter thread on the YC advice to founders. Equity’s episode: We think founders need a quick Heart to Heart about the market. Hana Mohan’s episode of Found.
Snowflake and other incumbents figure significantly, but Firebolt has been entering the picture when those new use cases, and new cracks, come up. He is now Firebolt’s CTO (a role previously held by Ariel Yaroshevich, one of the startup’s co-founders), and he will be leading a new Seattle office for the startup.
Founders : Before beU delivery, Hao Zheng, who leads the team as chief executive, was the founder and CEO of Yooul, a social networking app in China. Founders : Ahmed Ismail, a second-time founder who has worked for Goldman Sachs and Barclays, is the CEO. Location : Khartoum, Sudan. Website : [link].
Given there was a recession and a lot of uncertainty, it was a much easier pitch, considering we could offer a more affordable product,” Schneble said. The big incumbents haven’t figured out how to make plans affordable and accessible for smaller companies,” Schneble said. “We Last year, that number dropped to about 50%.
Then the next, I open my inbox to see pitches for nine-figure funding rounds (hello, SpotOn ) and the birth of new unicorns (looking at you, Unit ). Then the next, I have a founder telling me their latest round was preempted by a large venture firm in their industry. Here we are today. Maybe a little of both.
Founder Sachin Nayyar, who returned to Saviynt as CEO this week alongside newly-appointed president Paul Zolfaghari, said that the loan will be put toward expanding Saviynt’s platform, acquiring customers and growing the company’s partner ecosystem. ID management platform ForgeRock raised $275 million and reached a $2.8
There are many ways of spinning up a startup, but it takes a particularly brave set of founders to take on a deeply entrenched industry with a small number of incumbents who have the market all sown up. And every year, it falls flat. Mayht’s Heartmotion prototype speaker lineup. Image Credits: Mayht.
Its ambition lies in the fact that there are massive incumbents in this space, like Google and Microsoft. Co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra told TechCrunch that that level of competition wasn’t a hindrance, mainly because the company was very good at communicating its value and building highly effective flywheels for growth.
Back in December, Neeva co-founder and CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy , who previously spearheaded Google’s advertising tech business , teased new “cutting edge AI” and large language models (LLMs), positioning itself against the ChatGPT hype train. market, pitched as “authentic, real-time AI search.”
Nigel Verdon, co-founder and CEO of Railsbank, tells me the injection of capital will be used to continue expanding the fintech’s global footprint and for further product development. Asked what the upside of the Wirecard acquisition was, the Railsbank founder says it helps maintain an orderly market in the U.K.
Edtech needs to reach beyond underfunded public school systems to become more sustainable, which is why more investors and founders are focusing on lifelong learning. Jan Lynn-Matern , founder and partner, Emerge Education (a leading edtech seed fund in Europe with portfolio companies like Aula, Unibuddy and BibliU).
There’s a quick litmus-test conversation any early-stage VC will have with the founder and it’s one that you should be as prepared for as your elevator pitch. Founder: “$8–10 million” VC: “What’s your current burn rate?” Founder: “$250k / month.” Founder: “Um. Why are you raising so much?” Let me check my plan.”
” And this line was the classic motivation for all incumbents buying fintechs: “Why not just bring it in to our platform and get it to customers as quickly as possible?”. It looks like incumbent banks and institutions are still struggling when it comes to offering tech-enabled financial services. Funding and M&A.
I met Cruz Foam co-founder John Felts during the memorable Accelerator at Sea hosted by the Sustainable Ocean Alliance. His pitch made perfect sense: create a biodegradable alternative to expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam using a material provided in abundance by nature. .”
Each story is based on an interview with a founder or investor who addressed some of the most common startup dilemmas. TechCrunch reporter Natasha Mascarenhas interviewed Kleiner Perkins partner Bucky Moore to get sector-agnostic advice for founders who are ready to raise a Series A. When should I hire a sales team?
Notably, Metromile saw its valuation decline over 85% and was subsequently acquired by peer Lemonade , and it hasn’t been alone in losing a lot of value and being eyed by peers and incumbents. Stephen Brittain and Rob Lumley , directors and co-founders, Insurtech Gateway. Are you open to cold pitches? Absolutely.
“We intend to build the Standard Oil of renewable energy,” said James McGinniss, the co-founder and chief executive of David Energy , in a statement announcing the company’s new $19 million seed round of debt and equity funding. . Founded by McGinniss, Brian Maxwell and Ahmed Salman, David Energy raised $1.5
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