The great thing about entrepreneurship is that everyone starts in the same boat: with a blank slate. A new opportunity comes to life with an idea, snowballs with a business plan, and ends with a pitch deck in the hopes to secure enough funding to build a profitable company. It seems simple enough, but most first-time entrepreneurs are learning as they go. What do they need to include in their investor pitch decks and what can they leave out? Luckily, there are plenty of successful companies with pitch decks floating around to use as a guide.
We took a look at some epic brand’s pitch decks to help inspire our own. Check out our latest redesigned pitch deck presentations below.
Brex
Brex is reimagining financial systems so companies can unlock their full potential and scale more seamlessly.
Thousands of businesses— from start-ups to big tech— use Brex to manage their finances. They offer a financial suite of services from business accounts and credit cards to spend management software. Brex was founded in early 2017, and secured $7M in their series A funding round. The company has since grown in their own right and as of April 2021 were valued at over $7B.
Of course to get there they needed investors to help get their business off the ground. We’re taking Brex’s original pitch deck and giving it a Beautiful.ai spin.
Coinbase
Founded in 2012, Coinbase coins itself as the ‘future of money,’ offering a secure platform where people can buy, sell, and manage cryptocurrency right from their phones. Initially, trading was limited to bitcoin only. But through its substantial growth, users can manage hundreds of cryptocurrencies, including Dogecoin, Chainlink, and Ethereum. Today, Coinbase has more than 68 million verified users and became the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. in March 2021.
In the near-decade since the founders created the Coinbase pitch deck, the company has further disrupted the cryptocurrency industry with an innovative, sleek, and easy-to-use platform. As a result, the pitch deck needed revamping to reflect where the company is now. Enter: a redesigned Coinbase presentation that tells a streamlined story for future investors.
Crunchbase
Since its successful launch, Crunchbase has established itself as a go-to source for information and data about both private and public companies.
Crunchbase offers information such as investments and funding, background on founding members and individuals in leadership positions, mergers and acquisitions, business news, and industry trends. They separated from their parent company in 2015, and the brand continued to grow through a series of fundraising efforts. One of these pivotal junctures occurred in 2019 when the organization raised $30 million from six key investors led by OMERS Ventures. To achieve the remarkable investment, Crunchbase relied on a pitch deck.
Crunchbase’s 2019 pitch deck was already worthy in its own right, but we wanted to try our hand at another PowerPoint makeover.
Quora
Founded in 2009, Quora is the self-proclaimed ‘sweet spot’ of the internet: a place where audiences can discover relevant, high-quality content in the form of a question-and-answer platform. The ultimate goal? To bring users from all across the internet into one space, reducing their time spent elsewhere searching through scattered information, never finding the answers they need.
And the Quora co-founders succeeded in that goal. Today, the platform sees 300 million active users a month. To get there, though, they first needed buy-in from investors with a Quora pitch deck. While the presentation helped seal the deal, it called for a redesign that feels less amateur — one that reflects the ingenuity and excitement of the Quora platform we know and use today. The result: a Quora pitch deck with a more sophisticated design, strong color palette, and sleek (but subtle) animations.
In 2005, two college friends co-founded one of the most-viewed websites in the world: Reddit. Every day, more than 52 million users take to Reddit to post, comment, and vote on virtually any topic of interest. And with more than 100 thousand communities at their fingertips, Redditors can ‘Dive Into Anything.’
Just as unique as its communities (from Shower Thoughts to Astrophotography), Reddit’s pitch deck is quirky, eccentric, and original. Filled with lots of data and, of course, photoshopped cats, it captures the essence of the site’s personality. But Reddit’s presentation called for a more simplified and streamlined design that contains fewer cats. As a result, Beautiful.ai has created a revamped Reddit pitch deck, made for anyone ready to bring their own thoughts and ideas to life.
Slack
Regardless of whether you’re on a team of 3 or 300, you’re probably familiar with Slack. The app helps colleagues and stakeholders stay connected and communicate better — especially for hybrid teams embracing remote work.
Founded in 2009 by Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, Slack is a messaging app that connects the right people, information, and tools to improve workflows and collaboration. Over half of the Fortune 100 companies use Slack to connect their teams and drive their businesses forward. Slack was acquired by tech conglomerate, Salesforce, in 2021 in a $27.7 billion dollar deal that added the messaging app to its suite of enterprise software. But Slack, like all tech companies, had to start somewhere.
Despite their impressive acquisition, the founders of Slack had to pitch their company to investors in order to get it off of the ground. Check out the Beautiful.ai redesign of the pitch deck.
