Pitch Deck Examples from 3 Funded Startups

Want to create a pitch deck to raise funding for your startup? Here are 3 successful pitch deck examples you can learn from.

One of the best ways to build a successful pitch deck is to learn from other startups who have already been successful in raising funding from investors.

Below are 3 startup pitch decks that led to successful funding rounds.

Note: As we already mentioned in 14 steps to Creating an Effective Pitch:

"When I talk about creating a pitch, I'm not talking about a PowerPoint presentation. Sure, that's usually the format in which a pitch is ultimately presented to the world, but putting the slides together is the easy part. It's knowing what's going on the slides and how they will tell the story - that's the hard part."

So, it's important to keep in mind that a pretty pitch deck isn't what will get you funding. It's the work done to understand the business opportunity, and then present a compelling argument to potential investors as to why they should invest in your startup.

Viewing successful pitch decks likes the one below can serve as a powerful learning tool, but we want to do more than simply share the pitch deck of each of these successful startup pitches. We'll also highlight what we feel is the standout slide from each deck.

Now let's take a look at some winning decks, shall we?

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1. Airbnb (originally "Air Bed & Breakfast")

If you like to travel or you've been around the startup world long enough then there's a very good chance that you're familiar with tech unicorn Airbnb. As of May 2018 Airbnb was worth at least $38 billion, and has raised a total of $4.4B in funding over 15 rounds.

Standout slide(s):

Well, we love us a clear problem and a clear solution statement. So those stand out for us in this deck. Right from the first slide it's clear what the value proposition is, and that's something that investors appreciate. Keep it simple.

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2. Mixpanel

Mixpanel builds analytics software tor product and marketing, and they were able to raise $65M with this pitch deck.

Standout slide(s):

Sharing a powerful mission is always a great idea, and Mixpanel does this really well with slide 5. If we put our investor hat on, then slide 7 gives us a clear and proven path to profitability (which means there is some certainty that investors will get a positive ROI from investing into this startup).

Tip: Don't just show investors that you're not only going to make money after their investment, but also show them that you've already been making money and that it's been trending upward.

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3. Dropbox

This is the pitch deck Dropbox used to raise a $1.2m seed round from Sequoia. If you're not familiar with Dropbox, it's a file hosting service that allows users to store and share files across the web.

Standout slide(s):

The standout slides for us are slides 10 (competitor analysis) and 11 (where they screwed up).

Having said that, the most interesting thing about this pitch deck is that it's not visually as appealing as many that we see today.

This is definitely an excellent argument for ensuring that your content is compelling and tells a great story so that it can paint the picture of the opportunity in the investors' minds.

Even if your design is not so hot, if you can craft a compelling data-backed story, then you can still win. We see far too many cases of startups making the mistake of focusing too much on the design, and not enough on building the business case.

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Parting thoughts

We hope that you've found these winning pitch decks useful. You can find a whole bunch of others here and here. We'll also be sharing more pitch decks here on our blog in the near future.

It's also worth noting that the examples are not all 10-slide pitch decks (which is commonly thought of as the standard in the startup world).

We recommend that startups prepare three separate pitch decks for different pitch situations as part of our Pitch Success Framework. Download our free framework here.