18 Real-Life Pitch Deck Examples That Actually Got Funded

In my years of working in marketing (and design), I’ve seen how a great pitch deck can set you up for success. A solid presentation that balances design and narrative can help you sell your business idea to potential investors or partners.

Farzad Rashidi, lead innovator at Respona, puts it eloquently:

"A pitch deck is more than just a presentation—it’s your story in visual form. It’s the key tool you use to communicate your vision to potential investors, laying out the problem you’re solving, the opportunity you’re targeting, and how your solution fits into that landscape."

Many companies that exist today—even big-name startups—once had to create a pitch deck at the beginning of their journey. Thanks to the internet, we can access and study all those successful pitch decks for inspiration.

Below I've rounded up 18 successful pitch decks to inspire yours. Our team at Visme has also recreated some of these presentations into pitch deck templates you can use to attract funding and support for your own company.

Ready to create your own pitch deck? Use our presentation software and AI pitch deck generator to put together a professional investor presentation in minutes. 

Here's a short selection of 8 easy-to-edit templates you can edit, share and download with Visme. Keep scrolling for more templates.

Table of Contents

• What is a Pitch Deck?
• 18 Best Pitch Decks From Real-Life Startups
• What Makes a Good Pitch Deck?
• Pitch Deck FAQs

*Disclaimer: The comparisons and competitor ratings presented in this article are based on features available as of Apr 23, 2026. We conduct thorough research and draw on both first-hand experience and reputable sources to provide reliable insights. However, as tools and technologies evolve, we recommend readers verify details and consider additional research to ensure the information meets their specific needs.

What is a Pitch Deck?

Sandy Kory, a founder and General Partner at HorizonVC, defines a pitch deck as a series of slides that tells the story of a startup and its fundraising goals. It's an important document to highlight the substance of a startup as well as to show off the founders' storytelling abilities.

The purpose of a pitch deck is to attract investors who will fund the project or become a partner in the venture.

A well-structured pitch deck uses narrative flow to guide the audience through a clear arc—from a relatable problem to a compelling solution. Using this strategy can win over investors and make your presentation more persuasive.

Here are some key points to keep in mind when building your pitch deck:

• Aim for 10 to 15 slides to keep it focused and easy to follow
• Clearly show why your team is uniquely positioned to win
• Explain what changed in the market and why now is the right time
• Share real progress and traction toward your goals
• Include business model slides to clearly present how your company plans to generate revenue and demonstrate financial viability
• Add a go to market strategy slide to outline how you plan to reach your target market and achieve optimal growth
• Show how you plan to build a long-term partnership with investors

If you’re buzzing to create yours quickly, this video will guide you step by step in crafting a high-impact pitch deck that grabs investor attention and secures funding quickly.

18 Best Pitch Decks From Real-Life Startups

The best way to learn how to pitch is to study pitches that worked. Investors review many decks, so standing out requires a visually appealing and successful investor pitch deck that clearly communicates your story and value.

The best decks serve as models for what works, demonstrating how to attract attention and facilitate funding. Some raised millions on ugly slides. Others changed how their entire industry thinks about investment and pitch deck design

The 18 decks below were chosen because each one offers a distinct lesson like how to frame a problem, build credibility, handle competitors or walk into a room and own it.

1. Tinder Pitch Deck

Previously known as Matchbox, Tinder is one of the most popular dating apps in the world.

While Tinder's pitch deck below is not officially tied to any funding round, the app has raised over $50 million across just three rounds.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2012
• Stage: Pre-Seed
• Total Amount Raised: $50M
• Investors: Benchmark, IAC
• Revenue Model: P2P / App

So, what is it about Tinder’s presentation that makes it such a great pitch deck inspiration?

First, they do an excellent job of communicating the problem with a short (but relatable) story. Then, instead of talking about their proposed solution, they show it within their app.

The next few slides dive deeper into the app’s functionality — how it works and what value it provides. It also highlights user engagement as a key growth metric for dating apps like Tinder.

Finally, the deck summarizes additional features being developed and the revenue opportunity in two short slides.

Key Takeaway: Using storytelling to explain a problem can make it relatable and easier to understand. A good pitch deck puts investors in the customers’ shoes, which naturally makes them more intrigued to learn about the solution.

Another lesson to be learned here is to use your product’s functionality to explain the solution. Tinder does a great job of showing instead of telling with step-by-step screenshots of how users will navigate through the app to fulfill their needs.

Customize this business pitch deck template below, designed especially for apps and tech businesses, and apply your own storytelling principles:

Recreated in Visme:

2. Airbnb Pitch Deck

Some of the best investor decks present information in a digestible and understandable way. This is where an early pitch deck by Airbnb shines.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2008
• Stage: Seed
• Total Amount Raised: $6.4B
• Investors: Jean-Sébastien Wallez, Employee Stock Option Fund, GC Capital
• Revenue Model: P2P / Marketplace

Airbnb’s original pitch deck is commonly cited as one of the best and helped them raise $600k in funding. And if you look at it closely (like I did), you’ll see why. It's a real-world example of a masterful 10-slide presentation that covers all the essentials, including business model slides and growth metrics. That makes it a benchmark for effective storytelling and investor communication.

Each of Airbnb's PowerPoint slides is relatively basic, presenting the information quickly and efficiently. They also avoid the pitfalls of sticking simply to text, adding images and charts throughout that illustrate their points in a similar manner.

Key Takeaway: Airbnb's modern pitch deck design exemplifies simplicity at its finest. It’s so good, it’s inspired lots of startup pitch decks around the world.

According to Founderoo,“The Airbnb pitch deck is often used in business schools as a case study or example of a successful pitch. The Airbnb pitch deck is often used as a model of a well-crafted pitch that effectively communicates a company's value proposition and growth potential.”

Here’s a template inspired by Airbnb, created by our designers.

Recreated in Visme:

The Visme editor comes equipped with several AI features, like the AI Presentation Maker, which helps you craft a fully designed pitch deck from start to finish, including content and visuals. Additionally, the AI Writer can help you refine content in several ways, like summarizing longer text or refreshing older content.

Use the prompt window to explain what you need and watch the tool unleash its magic.

3. WeWork Pitch Deck

In the WeWork Pitch Deck Series D, they show projected growth in big numbers. I'm impressed by how they used the power of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to bring the message home to investors.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2014
• Stage: Series D
• Total Amount Raised: $22.2B
• Investors: Brookfield Asset Management, Cushman & Wakefield, SoftBank Capital
• Operating Model: Space-as-a-Service

By providing big-name services to their members through an affiliate scheme, they were able to add the logos of all these companies in their company deck and show who they were already working with.

The deck also clearly mapped out their competitive landscape. It lays out WeWork’s competitive advantage and how it differentiated itself from other coworking providers.

Not only did they get tons of funding with this pitch deck, but they're also now one of the biggest coworking space providers in the world. If you ask me, the team knew the potential of WeWork and was definitely not afraid to show it.

Key Takeaway: If you know your idea has the potential to be huge, show it. WeWork knew they had a sound business plan that was bound to grow with the right amount of support. They didn’t take any shortcuts and used visual charts to show huge projections and big plans.

Here’s a business pitch template inspired by WeWork to get you started.

Recreated in Visme:

4. Uber Pitch Deck

Fun fact: When Uber first started out, it was called UberCab.

The idea behind the business seemed like something right out of a fairy tale; cabs that would pick you up in minutes, which you didn’t have to call or stand on the curb for.

Even though their initial ideas did not fully reflect what Uber is today, their original pitch deck is a strong example of believing in a product during its early stages and charting a clear vision to secure seed funding

This professional pitch deck goes into detail about how UberCab could ultimately change the way taxis work, forever.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2008
• Stage: Pre-Seed Stage
• Total Amount Raised: $30.2B
• Investors: PayPal, Asas Capital, Toyota Motor, Think + Ventures
• OperatingModel: P2P / App

The slides in this business deck rely heavily on bullet points to get the message across, but they hit home because they are simple and short-winded. You can tell that the co-founders knew they had a great idea and all they needed was for the investors to see it the way they did. They had no charts because they were still a small enterprise and had no growth to show.

They were relying on a simple fact: their idea was a game changer.

Key Takeaway: Even if all you have is a great idea, a strong belief and a clear emphasis on your market size and vision is crucial for seed funding. It can help you get the funding you need to turn it into a reality. Forget fancy charts and long explanations — the best pitch deck designs keep it simple and get to the point quickly.

Investors often want to see the heart of your idea without sifting through unnecessary details.

Sandy Kory, Founder and General Partner at HorizonVC, emphasizes this point:

Here’s a template inspired by Uber to get you started.

Recreated in Visme:

5. BuzzFeed Pitch Deck

When BuzzFeed was small, with only five people in a tiny office in Chinatown, they knew they had to stand out from the crowd to get ahead. So, instead of just being one amongst the pack, they created their own pack.

They visualized this idea perfectly on slide 18 of their pitch deck. BuzzFeed pitched the idea of advertising as content, rather than treating content and advertising as two separate entities, which was the norm.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2008
• Stage: Series A
• Total Amount Raised: $696.6M
• Investors: Vivek Ramaswamy, Redwood Capital Group LLC, NBCUniversal
• Operating Model: Digital Media

In their effective pitch deck, BuzzFeed’s co-founders showed exactly how their idea worked and how it would look online. They also visualized exactly how the “advertisement as content” idea would benefit them, including screenshots of the actual website.

On the second-to-last slide, they asked “How big can this get?” and backed it up by outlining the market size and growth potential of viral media.

This helped investors understand not just the idea, but the scale of the opportunity.

Key Takeaway: If you're in the SaaS business, visualize your idea using actual screenshots of your product. Showing can be much more effective than simply telling, as it helps investors gain a deeper understanding of your idea.

Here’s a template inspired by BuzzFeed to get you started.

Recreated in Visme:

6. Buffer Pitch Deck

Buffer’s pitch deck is a great example of transparency and believing in your product.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2011
• Stage: Seed Round
• Total Amount Raised: $4M
• Investors: Bossanova Investimentos, Tiny Capital, Collaborative Fund
• Operating Model: SaaS

Buffer was one of the first to release their pitch deck publicly, not only helping others with their decks but also illustrating goodwill.

The company is one of the first to release their pitch deck publicly, not only helping others with their decks, but illustrating goodwill.

Key Takeaway: Transparency is valued by both customers and investors. It reinforces your honesty and trustworthiness, and helps them better understand how your product works. Even better, it displays complete confidence in your product or service.

Here’s a template inspired by Buffer you can use for your own deck.

Recreated in Visme:

7. Moz Pitch Deck

Moz's pitch deck features an adorable mascot that appears on all of their slides, and colorful blocks and charts that illustrate their points.

Their later slides are filled with fun images, such as cartoon character Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes) rampaging through a city.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2009
• Stage: Series B
• Total Amount Raised: $29.1M
• Investors: Foundry Group, Ignition Partners
• Operating Model: SaaS

The pitch deck never sacrifices the facts for fun either. They continue to describe their goals and statistics throughout, showing how useful they could be for investors and the business world in general.

SEOmoz has a rather appealing tagline: “How a tiny Mom & Son consultancy became a leader in SEO Software, and our roadmap to being Seattle’s next $1 billion company.”

The tagline opens with the promise of an appealing story (their journey to the big time), and ends with an ambitious goal, piquing curiosity and convincing interested investors to follow along.

Key Takeaway: It’s no secret that describing statistics and information can be, well, boring. Many seasoned investors have already heard such things countless times, even through the course of the day. So, how do you make yours stand out?

Simple: do something different and entertaining, while still offering the information you need to get your point across. SEOmoz does this admirably in their pitch deck.

Here’s a template inspired by SEOmoz to get you started.

Recreated in Visme:

When creating a pitch deck with Visme, you have access to practical business features that help you create decks more productively. Dynamic fields, for example, enable you to design one pitch deck template and input custom fields that can be easily adjusted with a few clicks. You can use this feature to tailor your message according to your audience.

8. LinkedIn Pitch Deck

The way you design your pitch deck depends on several things, like your target market and the people you hope will invest in your product.

LinkedIn's Series B pitch deck is specifically aimed towards more serious, business-minded individuals, considering that is the intended audience to use the product.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2014
• Stage: Series B
• Total Amount Raised: $154.8M
• Investors: Greylock, Goldman Sachs, S&P Global,
• Operating Model: Social Media

Their pitch deck is filled with straightforward facts and data that logically define the site’s worth, rather than more artistic and stylized elements.

LinkedIn even goes a step further and shows the relations between the current most-used mediums for certain services and their older counterparts (e.g. using a bank in the past versus using PayPal in the present).

This allows them to prove their point—that the internet has become the most-used base for services previously offered offline—and show their particular niche, again endearing themselves to their audience.

They even have a team slide in their deck to show off all the experts to help get their pitch off the ground and running, even if it did flop in the end.

Key Takeaway: Tailor your content to your target audience. If your product or service is aimed at younger people, you’ll probably want to include more references to pop culture and familiar terms in your deck. If you’re pitching to a more mathematically inclined group, your deck should be more organized and filled with data.

The team slide is considered one of the three critical slides investors look for, along with traction and market, as it demonstrates the startup's potential for success. For early-stage companies, a media kit can also be used to present key metrics and user engagement, helping attract investors before revenue is established.

Here’s a template inspired by LinkedIn to get you started.

Recreated in Visme:

9. YouTube Pitch Deck

With over 2 billion users, YouTube is the largest video sharing platform in the world.

The company has raised around $11.5 million in funding in just two rounds. This professional pitch deck below is from their first funding round in 2005, when they pitched to Sequoia Capital. At the time, the platform had less than 10,000 users.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2005
• Stage: Series A
• Total Amount Raised: $11.5M
• Investors: Sequoia Capital, ARTIS Ventures
• Operating Model: App / Social Media

YouTube’s investor presentation is a solid example of what a traditional pitch deck outline looks like. Keep in mind that this deck is quite old, which is probably why it lacks good design and visuals.

Even so, it covers key details by highlighting the problem, presenting the exact solution, listing the competition, and outlining the sales and distribution plan.

Key Takeaway: If you're a small business with a unique product that is better than the competition, it can sell itself. Strong products are more likely to attract investors even if you do not focus too much on the design.

Also, even if you’re keeping it basic, make sure you incorporate all the important details like what you plan to achieve and how you plan to get there.

Use the template below inspired by YouTube to highlight your key strengths and what makes you better than your competitors.

Recreated in Visme:

As you work on your pitch deck in Visme, you have the opportunity to work collaboratively and brainstorm using the online whiteboard. Additionally, you can also use the workflow feature to work on projects together. Assign specific slides to particular team members and leave each other comments and feedback to finish the deck together.

10. Facebook Pitch Deck

We all know about Facebook (Meta) — our beloved social media platform that helps us stay connected with our friends, family, colleagues, pets and the world in general.

Till now, Facebook’s parent company Meta has secured over $24.6 billion in funding, and this pitch deck from 2004 played a key role in helping Mark Zuckerberg build the largest social network in the world.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2004
• Stage: Pre-Seed
• Total Amount Raised: $24.6B
• Investors: JP Morgan, Vanguard, BlackRock
• Operating Model: App / Social Media

Initially, Facebook was created for the students, alumni, faculty and staff at Harvard University. Later, it expanded to include other schools and universities, but it wasn’t long until it transcended academic institutions and took over the world.

Because Facebook wasn’t really making any money at the time, it relied on social proof as well as usage and engagement statistics to sell its idea — and it worked!

Key Takeaway: As a startup, you don’t always need to have financial information to back up your idea. If you don’t currently have any revenue data to show, you can still make a strong case with usage, engagement and audience metrics that show potential for growth. Make sure to use white space effectively in your slides to create clean, easy-to-read visuals that help your story stand out.

Also, adding social proof can go a long way toward building trust and credibility with investors. This works especially well if those customer reviews and testimonials highlight your potential to go big.

Visualize usage and engagement statistics using the Facebook-inspired template below.

Recreated in Visme:

11. Artisan Pitch Deck

Source

When Jaspar Carmichael-Jack founded Artisan in 2024, it had already hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue within three months of launching. That traction did a lot of the convincing when pitching to investors.

Looking at the deck, it centers on two core problems: the manual, repetitive nature of the BDR role and a fragmented SaaS stack that made proper automation nearly impossible. Artisan's solution was to consolidate everything into a single platform powered by AI employees, starting with Ava, their AI sales agent.

The team communicated their solution clearly without overcomplicating the technical messaging. They demonstrated a defensible competitive moat through measurable proprietary data and a self-learning model. They've also included a strong business model slide to clarify their B2B SaaS approach.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2024
• Stage: Seed
• Total Amount Raised: $11.5M
• Investors: VCs, Angels: Oliver Jung (Lead), Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, Day One Ventures, Sequoia Scout, Soma Capital, BOND Capital, Fellow’s Fund, 10x Founders Fund, and others
• Operating Model: B2B AI SaaS

Key Takeaway: Traction speaks louder than projections. Artisan didn't rely on market size slides or big promises; they showed up with revenue, customers and a product already working.

If you have early results, lead with them. Numbers give investors something concrete to hold onto, and in a crowded space, that's often what truly makes the difference.

For instance, the traction slide in this app service pitch deck template visualizes the data with a colored table. And if you’d like to show your traction differently, try a line chart or histogram.

12. Rippling Pitch Deck

Source

Parker Conrad co-founded Rippling in 2017, with a sharp idea: stop selling point solutions and put HR, IT and finance on a single platform. By the time Rippling raised Series B, the product had already proven that Conrad’s idea was working.

The deck itself was unusually transparent. Rippling published it publicly after closing the round, offering it as a template other founders could learn from. The design combines a company overview with a detailed SaaS metrics update, plus a custom measure called Month Zero Cash-on-Cash Payback. It was a metric they invented internally to track how fast their sales team recouped acquisition costs.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2020
• Stage: Series B
• Total Amount Raised: $145M
• Investors: VC — Founders Fund (Lead), Greenoaks Capital, Coatue Management, Bedrock Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Initialized Capital, and Y Combinator
• Operating Model: Financial SaaS

Key Takeaway: Own your metrics. Rippling invented its own measure of sales efficiency and explained exactly how it worked. That level of precision told investors that founders understood their business deeply.

When building your version in Visme, use the data visualization tools to present key metrics in clean, neat charts. If you have a custom metric like Rippling did, dedicate a slide to explaining it visually: how it's calculated, what it measures and why it matters. Using one slide to focus on a critical metric or your business model ensures the information is concise, impactful, and easy for investors to grasp.

In the retail store pitch deck below, you’ll notice a slide that visualizes the projected investment per store. It’s not exactly a proprietary data benchmark, but it’s customized to align with the visual identity of the rest of the presentation. The important thing in either case, is that it looks good and is easy to skim.

13. Perplexity Pitch Deck

Source

In August 2024, Perplexity released a deck pitching brands on its newly launched ad platform. They were offering unique advertising spots in their AI search engine.

The deck made it clear that Perplexity saw itself as a direct challenger to Google's ad model. It opened by explaining that traditional search is outdated, built around sponsored links and irrelevant results. They it positioned Perplexity as a cleaner, higher-intent alternative.

To convince investors of their value, they leaned on their audience demographics. Up to 82% of its users held undergraduate degrees and 30% were in senior leadership roles, making it an attractive platform for brands targeting professionals.

The ad formats themselves were designed to feel native. Advertisers could sponsor related questions, run video ads or take over an entire answer page, with the promise that sponsored content would behave like organic results.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2024
• Type: Advertiser pitch deck
• Monthly Queries at time of pitch: 230M globally
• Ad Categories Targeted: 15, including tech, health, finance and travel
• Operating Model: AI-powered answer engine/advertising platform

Key Takeaway: A pitch deck doesn't always have to go to investors. Perplexity used its vision to sell to advertisers by showing mockups of audience data, ad formats and brand safety features.

If you're pitching a digital product, use Visme's device mockup frames to show your interface in context, as Perplexity did, walking advertisers through exactly what an ad placement would look like in the product. Because a lot of the time, seeing is more convincing than describing.

In this health tech pitch deck from our gallery, you’ll see several slides that use mockups. To customize them, all you need to do is drag the image into the mockup placeholder and the editor will make it fit perfectly. If you do need to make a little adjustment, click on the image and use the settings tab.

14. Reddit IPO Pitch Deck

Source

Nineteen years after launching as a simple link-sharing site, Reddit finally went public. Their IPO deck, part of their S-1 filing and March 2024 roadshow, had a different purpose than a typical startup pitch. Instead of convincing VCs to write a check, Reddit had to persuade institutional investors, analysts and the public markets that Reddit was worth backing.

Reddit leaned into what made it genuinely different: its communities. The deck centered on the platform's 73 million daily active users spread across more than 100,000 active subreddits and positioned user-generated content as a strategic asset.

Data licensing became a key part of the revenue story, with Reddit having already signed a $60 million annual deal with Google to train its AI models right around the time of the S-1 drop.

The most unusual move was letting its own users in. In a nod to the community-first story it was pitching, Reddit invited moderators and longtime users to buy shares at the IPO price, a privilege normally reserved for institutional investors. It was a risky bet, but one that reinforced the deck's central argument: Reddit's community isn't just its product, it's its competitive moat.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2024
• Type: IPO roadshow / S-1 filing
• IPO Valuation: $6.4B
• Ticker: RDDT (NYSE)
• Operating Model: Advertising, data licensing and user economy

Key Takeaway: An IPO deck tells a fundamentally different story from a seed pitch. Reddit proved that 19 years of community-building created something defensible and monetizable. If, like Reddit, you have a loyal user base, take the time to quantify their value.

Reddit turned its most engaged users into a selling point for investors, and then made them shareholders. How did they do that? By basing their deck’s visual identity on memes. You could say that memes are the glue that holds Reddit together, so of course, they had to use that in the deck. What holds your startup together? Use that as the basis of your visual story.

This template from our collection is perfect for adding memes to. The design is simple yet modern. There’s enough space to place relevant memes that relate to your brand. Visme has a Giphy integration where you can source lots of memes and GIFs. If you don’t find any you like, use Visme’s AI Image Generator to create your own.

15. Seattle Storm Pitch Deck

Source

The Seattle Storm pitch deck is an unconventional example but still worth learning from. For starters, it wasn't built by a tech startup chasing funding. It was put together by a professional women's basketball franchise trying to sell minority stakes to finance a new training facility, in a market that investors had historically undervalued.

The deck had to do more than just pitch a product. It had to change an existing perception. Women's sports have long been dismissed as a poor investment, so the Storm's majority owners, Lisa Brummel, Dawn Trudeau and Ginny Gilder, built a case around market momentum. Multiple slides focused on the growth of women's sports across viewership, ticket sales, sponsorship and audience demographics.

The traction slides were also super important. They displayed four WNBA championships, record attendance figures and partnership revenue, giving investors something concrete to evaluate. The use-of-funds slide tied everything together, showing exactly where the $21 million would go: a privately funded, 50,000-square-foot practice facility in Seattle's Interbay neighborhood. The round closed at a WNBA-record $151 million valuation.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2023
• Stage: Minority stake sale
• Total Amount Raised: $21M
• Investors: 12 investor groups, mostly women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+
• Operating Model: Professional sports franchise

Key Takeaway: When your market is underestimated, your deck has to make the case for the category before it makes the case for your business. The Storm led with the growth of women's sports as a whole, then showed why they were the best bet within it.

If you're operating in an emerging or overlooked space, context slides will work as the foundation of your pitch, so give them the importance they deserve.

Do you know what’s super similar to a pitch deck in sports? A sponsorship proposal deck. The template is just that, a presentation that pitches sponsors to donate to a league and be part of the seasonal excitement.

To recreate the effect of players without a background, upload your photo and use the background eraser feature. In a couple of seconds, you’ll have cutouts just like in the template.

16. ElevenLabs Pitch Deck

Source

In January 2023, ElevenLabs completed a $2 million pre-seed raise. Months later, they raised $19 million at a $100 million valuation with no office and just 15 employees. By January 2024, they were a unicorn.

The company's origin story is a testament to builders being the ideal users. Co-founders Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski grew up in Poland watching poorly dubbed American films and wanted to fix it. That personal connection gave their whole idea a human entry point.

The problem slide was simple and to the point. Traditional dubbing costs $100 per minute and takes over two weeks to produce. Eleven Labs’ solution was to offer AI-generated speech in any language that sounds natural, retains the speaker's voice and takes a fraction of the time. And of course, at a fraction of the cost.

Instead of chasing their TAM (Total Addressable Market), the deck focused on a specific initial market, YouTube creators with over 500,000 subscribers. Eleven Labs built a credible revenue case from that niche. It was a focused, honest approach that gave investors something concrete to evaluate.

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2023
• Stage: Pre-Seed
• Total Amount Raised: $2M
• Investors: Credo Ventures, Concept Ventures
• Operating Model: AI SaaS/voice synthesis platform

Key Takeaway: At pre-seed, you have no traction to show and no office to point to. ElevenLabs won investors over with a specific problem, a demonstrable solution and a narrow target market. It was a tight story, and it worked.

For tips on building that kind of narrative into your own deck, Visme's guide on presentation storytelling techniques breaks down how to structure your story from problem to solution, keeping audiences engaged throughout.

Here’s an example of how to use storytelling in your pitch deck. This festival event template presents the problem, solution and plan through storytelling techniques that invite the viewer to read the content. Best of all, when you align short text snippets with an engaging design, the deck flows well, especially for asynchronous presenting.

17. Tala Pitch Deck

Source

Founder Grace Beverley built Tala's seed deck herself over a single weekend, using a template and adding her branding.

Grace’s company, Tala, is a UK sustainable activewear brand she founded in 2019. She built it to fill a specific gap: affordable and sustainable activewear. Her observation became the deck's opening story; it was personal, specific and easy for investors to relate to.

The deck covered the founder's background, business metrics, sustainability ethos, team, competitors, market size, global opportunity and use of funds. She also included internal diversity stats, such as board composition, cap table breakdowns and team gender splits, to show investors which values ran through the business.

The round was oversubscribed. Six weeks of pitching ended with six term sheets.

Watch Beverly’s video about her experience below:

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2021
• Stage: Seed
• Total Amount Raised: $5.7M (£4.2M)
• Investors: Active Partners and Venrex (co-leads), Pembroke VCT, Nicola Kilner, Michelle Kennedy, Simon Mottram, and others
• Operating Model: DTC (Direct to Customer) sustainable activewear

Key Takeaway: Beverley's deck worked because it looked and felt like Tala from the first slide. The colors, the tone, the values: all of it was consistent. When building your own deck, make sure it's an extension of your brand identity, not just a template with your logo dropped in.

Use Visme's Brand Wizard with our pitch deck templates to instantly apply your brand colors, fonts, and logo across every slide. This way, your deck will feel cohesive right from the start.

With the template below, you get a similar feel as the Tala deck: soft colors and a tranquil vibe. This deck is also easy to brand while keeping the gradient design. All you have to do is switch the gradient colors and add your brand colors. If you want to keep the design as is, but just change the content, choose to Edit with AI and you’ll have it ready in minutes.

18. Stan Pitch Deck

Source

John Hu pitched Stan to investors in April 2021 while still a first-year Stanford MBA student. He had no product, no revenue and no co-founder. What he had was a TikTok channel, a sharp understanding of the creator economy and an unconventional opening move.

Instead of starting with an opening slide, Hu pulled up his TikTok and played it for the investor. The video documented his market research process in real time: DMing creators, getting ghosted and eventually landing a conversation with a farmer turned influencer. It was scrappy, specific and immediately established why he was the right person to be building this.

The pitch deck itself was rough. The slides were plain; the solution slide was unclear; and his investor described the use-of-funds page as a D+. But the story arc held: here's the customer, here's the problem, here's the market, here's early traction and here's what I need. Twenty-five beta testers weren't many, but they were enough to show the idea had legs beyond the founder's own imagination.

Stan's premise was a Shopify-style site for creators. An all-in-one platform where anyone building an audience could sell digital products, manage their store and grow a business without stitching together a dozen different tools.

The round closed at a $25M valuation. By the end of 2023, Stan had grown ARR 8.6x to $14.7M.

Watch John’s conversation with Stan’s founder in the video below:

Original pitch deck:

• Year: 2021
• Stage: Seed
• Total Amount Raised: $5M
• Investors: Forerunner Ventures (lead), Gary Vaynerchuk, Steven Bartlett, Norwest Venture Partners, and others
• Operating Model: Creator economy SaaS

Key Takeaway: In the video above, Hu's investor gave the deck a C grade. It still got funded. The deck wasn't what closed the deal; it was Hu’s live pitch. He opened with a TikTok video, established credibility instantly and kept investors interested right from the start.

When you're ready to present your pitch deck live, use Visme's Presenter Notes to keep your talking points close without reading off the screen. That way, your delivery stays conversational, the way Hu's did.

Are you looking for a pitch deck template that uses a similar color palette to Stan? It’s a good combination, super easy to read and doesn’t impede comprehension. Well, this template is just what you need. It’s ready to customize with your pitch information and start sending it to potential investors.

Bonus: Startup Pitch Deck Presentation Theme

Looking for more than a simple slide template? We've got the ultimate pitch deck theme to help you pull together all of the perfect slides.

It all starts with a story. Our pitch deck theme centers around 12 different startup archetypes or founder stories that can help you pull the best introduction slides and put together the best story that really sells your pitch.

Check out the introduction category of this theme's slides to read all about the different archetypes and pinpoint how you should angle your pitch deck's intro and overall brand story.

This theme offers over 60 different slide options for your startup to choose from when building the best pitch deck. Try out the investor pitch deck theme for your next pitch deck.

Create a stunning presentation in less time

• Hundreds of premade slides available
• Add animation and interactivity to your slides
• Choose from various presentation options

Sign up. It’s free.

What Makes a Good Pitch Deck?

I’m sure you’re buzzing with inspiration by now. But before you run off to create your own, let’s talk about what makes a good pitch deck.

In my experience, there are some elements that separate an average pitch deck from a great one that actually grabs investor attention.

In fact, you’ll notice as you go through the pitch deck examples above that the best startup presentations (e.g. Airbnb, WeWork, Uber and Facebook) incorporate at least some (if not all) of the following components. Let’s take a look:

• Use the right slides. There are 10 key slides every pitch deck should have, including an introduction, problem/solution, business model, statistics, etc. I always recommend fleshing out a proper pitch deck outline before you start gathering content.
• Tell a story. I can’t stress enough the importance of storytelling in a pitch deck. If you really want to captivate your audience, explain why people will want or need what you’re offering. Here are some presentation structures to help you craft a compelling story around your business idea.
• Be passionate about your idea. No one wants to listen to someone half-heartedly pitch a business idea. You need to believe in it and make your audience believe in it, too.
• Proofread and practice. Small issues like typos or a million “ums” during your speech can quickly add up and make you look unprofessional. Review your slides and rehearse them so you’re ready to present confidently.
• Pay attention to design. Old, boring and bulleted PowerPoints won’t get you anywhere anymore. With access to beautiful templates and AI-powered design tools (*ahem* Visme *ahem*) it’s easier than ever to create captivating pitch decks.

For even more tips on your pitch deck design, watch this video:

If you need help creating attention-grabbing pitch decks, you can use the versions recreated in Visme as a starting point. Better yet, allow Visme's AI presentation maker to do the heavy lifting for you—it handles everything from design to content, speeding up your pitch deck design process.

With just a text prompt, this advanced tool helps you generate pitch deck presentations complete with images, icons, illustrations, text, and everything else—in just seconds.

For example, you can draw inspiration from any of these pitch deck examples and instruct the AI presentation maker to generate a similar pitch deck design tailored to your business and topic of choice. Isn't that amazing?

Pitch Deck FAQs

Get Started With Your Own Pitch Deck

If you want to create an amazing pitch deck that highlights your business idea and appeals to the right investors, Visme's pitch deck templates can help you get started on the right foot.

Our investor pitching templates are designed by professionals and include realistic information to guide your pitch deck content creation process.

You can download your finished pitch deck in various formats, like PPTX, PDF and even HTML5. You can also share your presentation online via a link or embed it within your website.

Remember, the key is to stay true to your message, stay true to your brand, be honest, and show results. Here's another great resource to help you learn how to create a pitch deck for your startup.

Written by Mahnoor Sheikh

Mahnoor is a freelance writer and content strategist for B2B SaaS brands (and a toddler mom). She loves to talk about marketing, sales, branding and visual design. When she’s not working, she’s chilling at home (or the beach), cooking gourmet dinners for her family or traveling the world. She’s currently based in Antalya. Connect with her on LinkedIn or check out her website.