Billion-dollar pitch deck examples (before they were famous)
Only one in 25,000 (.004%) of all new businesses ever reach $100 million in sales. Even fewer achieve the esteemed title of a unicorn (a startup valued at $1 billion). As of March 2022, there are only over 1,000 unicorn companies in the world, according to Investopedia.
When you look at some of these massive, multi-billion-dollar organizations such as Uber, Facebook, or LinkedIn, it can be difficult to see them as anything other than market-leading titans. However, the majority (if not all) of these companies came from humble beginnings, and their co-founders went through the arduous process of finding seed funding and courting investors.
For both founders & funders, the pitch decks that helped these companies raise financing in their early phases are incredibly edifying references — we’ve created a list of the early-stage investor pitch decks behind 29 billion-dollar “unicorn” startups:
- Airbnb
- Alan
- Appnexus
- Brex
- Buzzfeed
- Canva
- Coinbase
- Dropbox
- Foursquare
- Intercom
- Mixpanel
- Monzo
- MySQL
- N26
- Nutanix
- Oscar
- Pendo
- Revolut
- SendGrid
- SNYK
- Tinder
- Uber
- Wealthsimple
- WeWork
- TransferWise
- Yammer
- YouTube
Airbnb
COVID-19 significantly impacted Airbnb, which raised Series G funding in April 2020 which roughly halved its valuation to $18 billion. According to the founders: “A crisis brings you clarity about what is truly important.”
Nevertheless, the original Airbnb investor presentation has become a trusted reference for founders and a staple of early-stage startup lore — serving as the basis of the pitch deck formulas popularized by all-time great investors like Sequoia Capital and Y-Combinator . We have even published our own expert pitch deck teardown and presentation template based on the Airbnb Pitch Deck!
IPO Valuation: $47 billion
Amount Raised: $600k
Round: Pre-Seed
Alan
Alan is a digital platform that makes health insurance more convenient and inexpensive. The French tech startup achieved unicorn status after securing a massive new investment round in 2021. The infusion of €185 million ($220 million) in funding valued the company at €1.4 billion ($1.67 billion).
Current Valuation: $1.67 billion
Amount Raised: $54m
Round: Series A
Appnexus
By 2020, the company grew to one of the largest digital ad exchanges in the world. Appnexus was acquired by AT&T in June 2018 for an estimated $1.6 billion to $2 billion and merged into AT&T’s ad tech unit, Xandr. AT&T subsequently sold the unit to Microsoft for an unknown sum.
Value at AT&T acquisition: $1.6B-$2B
Amount Raised: $2.5M
Round: Seed
Brex
Brex is a fintech startup that provides credit cards and cash management solutions to startups & founders with the goal of helping them save and spend money. It enables businesses of all sizes to rapidly obtain a credit card with 20x higher limits, entirely automates spending management, eliminates receipt monitoring, and magically integrates with accounting systems. Brex used this pitch deck to raise $57 in a Series B funding round in 2018. The most recent valuation puts the company at $12.3 billion. Although the company had to lay off 62 employees due to the pandemic, it has raised roughly $1 billion in funding since May 2020 as the race to dominate the corporate expenditures sector heats up.
Current Valuation: $12.3B
Amount Raised: $2.5M
Round: Seed
Buzzfeed
BuzzFeed is a multi-platform digital media firm that provides news and entertainment to a global audience. BuzzFeed had only five individuals operating in an office in Chinatown in 2008, writing for a monthly readership of 700,000 visitors, and used this investor presentation to raise $3.5 million in Series A investment. In March 2020, the website claimed more than 1.2 billion unique page views across its websites for the month, as well as a 41 percent year-over-year (YoY) increase in unique visitors, despite having to enact wage cuts and lay off approximately 6 percent of its US workers as a result of the pandemic. BuzzFeed went public in December 2021 through a SPAC merger.
Valuation at SPAC merger: $1.7B
Amount Raised: $3.5M
Round: Series A
Canva
Canva is a graphic design platform that includes a drag-and-drop design tool as well as a stock library of pictures, illustrations, and iconography. This pitch deck helped the company raise $6.6 million in a Seed round. The slides explain how tools like Google Docs are useful but don’t allow for the same kind of collaboration in design as they do for documents & text. The presentation touts the platform as a solution that will drive designers to abandon offline solutions in favor of online publishing. Since this seed round, Canva has received around $570 million in investment, growing its total valuation to $40 billion.
You may be interested in our expert-designed Canva Pitch Deck template — built for editing in Canva!
Current valuation: $40B
Amount Raised: $6.6M
Round: Seed
Coinbase
Coinbase is a cryptocurrency trading and exchange platform established in the United States that caters to retail customers, institutions, and ecosystem partners. This pitch deck helped the company raise $600,000 from angel investors and FundersClub in 2012. Coinbase has since raised an additional $539 million in funding since its humble beginnings in 2012 with this 12-slide presentation.
Current valuation: $86B
Amount Raised: $600K
Round: Seed
Dropbox
Dropbox made its startup debut in the summer of 2007 at the Y Combinator Demo Day. Dropbox’s first pitch deck was shared by Sequoia Capital (their Series A lead investor). This 17-slide deck helped the company raise a $1.2 million seed round that year. The investor presentation provides insight into the company’s freemium business model and bottom-up client acquisition strategy. Dropbox went public in March 2018 with a valuation of more than $12 billion.
Founders in the cloud collaboration &/or software space may be interested in our expert-designed Dropbox Pitch Deck template (based on the original Dropbox Series A investor presentation)!
Current valuation: $72B
Amount Raised: $1.2M
Round: Pre-Seed
Back in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and a few of his fellow Harvard students launched Facebook as a means for college and university students to communicate with one another. The initial Facebook pitch deck from 2004 was a media package used to secure potential advertisers before going public with the service. The slides emphasize the website’s addictive nature and refer to its user growth rate as a hint of its potential for greater adoption. In August 2004, thefacebook.com received its first investment, a $500K seed round from billionaire venture entrepreneur and ex-PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel.
Valuation at IPO: $104B
Amount Raised: $500k
Round: Early Stage
…see all 29 pitch decks →
We couldn’t fit everything here, so read the full article here!
How-to create your own pitch deck
We hope you learned something from the Tomorrow Health pitch deck, and that you are able to use these insights for your own business. If you’d like to, you can bookmark it at bestpitchdeck.com
Although it probably goes without saying that having a successful business (outside just their pitch deck) was integral to their success, it is critical for any startup to ensure your vision is portrayed properly. That’s where crafting the perfect pitch deck comes essential:
You might find our other resources on how-to create a pitch deck helpful, or benefit from using one of our expert-designed templates:
Our team has helped create decks that have closed over $100M+ in deals & funding for leading startups and even VC firms. You can leverage this experience and get a jumpstart on your pitch with one of our easy-to-use presentation templates, one-pagers, or financial models.
Creating a deck? Check out our pitch deck templates.
Every pitch requires a unique approach tailored to its audience. Our team of experts has created pitch decks for different industries, as well as funding stages:
Silicon Pitch Deck Template — You might be interested in the popular Silicon Pitch Deck designed by our team of experts at VIP.graphics: cutting-edge slides based on decks that closed millions in deals & funding.
Accelerator Pitch Deck Template — The Accelerator Pitch Deck template was crafted for early-stage founders seeking to win funding &/or investment from pitch contests, accelerators, incubators, and angels or VC firms. Winning a pitch contest or being accepted to a prominent accelerator program requires a unique strategic approach to an investor pitch presentation.
Series A Pitch Deck Template — A pitch deck template for startups and founders raising funding: Smart, actionable slides that work. This is a pitch deck template built specifically for startups, entrepreneurs and founders raising their first seed or Series A round of institutional capital.
Mergers & Acquisitions Pitch Deck Template — Perfect Pitch Deck™ is a template crafted for later-stage businesses entering more sophisticated discussions such as mergers & acquisitions (M&A), late-stage investment (Series C+), or other partnerships & financing opportunities. Our team of experts created this presentation to empower founders to present with confidence to investment banks, private equity (PE) groups, and/or hedge funds (and vice versa).
Alternatively, feel free to browse our growing selection of pitch decks tailored for specific industries and businesses.
Originally published at https://vip.graphics on July 9, 2022.
