Does the Pitch Deck Actually Matter? Ten Recent Decks That Raised Millions
And no, not the Airbnb deck again. These are the ones you probably have not studied, ending with the one old deck that still earns its place
Each company name below links to its deck, which you can view and download for free.
Every fundraising conversation eventually reaches the same shrug. Good companies raise, bad companies do not, and the deck is just a formality that follows conviction. There is something to that, but it collapses the moment you look at how investors actually consume decks, because conviction has to survive the part of the process where nobody has met you yet.
The most useful numbers here come from Papermark, which analysed 24,541 decks shared between January 2024 and June 2026, covering more than 358,000 investor views. The median investor view lasts 77 seconds. Around 44% of decks are never opened at all, half of those that are opened collect five views or fewer, and 16% of views end inside ten seconds. Eighteen percentage points of the audience disappear between slide one and slide two, and only 44% of readers reach the final slide. DocSend’s own analysis puts average first-pass attention at roughly two minutes, with decks longer than fifteen slides seeing around 40% lower engagement.
So the deck does not create conviction, but it is the only artefact that carries your conviction into rooms you are not in. An analyst skims it in 77 seconds, a partner sees the forwarded version, and someone has to retell your story in a Monday meeting from memory. The deck is what they remember. Treated that way, it deserves the same attention as the model and the reference calls, which is roughly the opposite of how most founders build it in the last week before a raise.
Here are ten recent ones worth studying, including the single older deck I would still send a founder today.
1. ShopMy, $77.5M Series B
The creator marketing platform raised $18.5 million in March 2024 led by Inspired Capital, then $77.5 million in January 2025 co-led by Bessemer and Bain Capital Ventures at a reported $410 million valuation, and has since raised a further $70 million at a $1.5 billion valuation led by Avenir.
The deck positions the company as infrastructure connecting two sides of a market rather than as a tool with features, and it leads with outcomes that matter to the buyer, such as brand sales driven and return on spend, rather than user counts. If you are pitching a marketplace, the lesson is to prove value separately for each side and then show why the two reinforce each other.
2. FINBOURNE Technology, £55M Series B
The London investment data company raised £55 million, about $70 million, in June 2024 led by Highland Europe and AXA Venture Partners, with a secondary sale three months later taking the combined figure past £100 million.
Its deck opens with founder credibility before anything else, using Thomas McHugh’s banking background to establish domain authority in a market where trust is the product. It then pairs each funding stage with a concrete milestone, so the funding history reads as a growth narrative instead of a list. The problem slide splits into organizational and investment challenges, which widens the number of stakeholders who see themselves in it. Client logos and named case studies carry the traction load where revenue is not disclosed.
3. Tracebit, $20M Series A
The London cybersecurity company raised a $5 million seed in 2024 led by Accel, then a $20 million Series A in March 2026 led by FirstMark, bringing its total to $25 million after multiplying its recurring revenue fivefold.
The deck’s central move is reframing the question. Instead of promising to stop every attack, it starts from the assumption that breaches happen and argues the real problem is detection speed. That reframing does the work that a feature list cannot, because it changes what the buyer is comparing.
4. Vybe, $10M seed
The San Francisco company, founded by a repeat YC founder whose previous company was acquired by Coda, raised $10 million led by First Round Capital with Y Combinator participating.
Its competitive positioning is the part to steal. Rather than one crowded comparison grid, the deck gives a separate slide to each rival category, vibe coding tools, Retool and no-code platforms. It builds its case by elimination before presenting itself, resolving the argument in a single two-axis chart. The pipeline slide labels the source of every early deal, which makes small revenue credible instead of hopeful.
5. Natcap, $10M Series A
The Oxford spinout raised a £2.5 million seed in early 2023 and a $10 million Series A in July 2024, backed by Oxford Science Enterprises alongside André Hoffmann and the former chief executive of Refinitiv.
Natcap had to sell a market before it could sell a product, so the deck spends its early slides on regulation, using CSRD, SFDR and TNFD reporting requirements to explain why nature data becomes a budget line rather than a nice idea. Any founder in an emerging category is really pitching the category first, and this deck shows how to do that without losing the reader.
6. Uncaged Innovations, $5.6M seed
The New York biomaterials company raised $2 million in pre-seed funding in 2023 with Jaguar Land Rover’s investment arm participating, then $5.6 million in July 2024 co-led by Green Circle Foodtech Ventures and Fall Line Capital.
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The deck moves from a material science breakthrough to what a luxury or automotive buyer actually cares about, which is feel, durability and price. It also turns capital efficiency into a selling point, arguing the company reached production on a fraction of what earlier leather alternatives burned through, which is a sharper differentiator in 2026 than any sustainability claim.
7. Protecto, $4M seed
The Silicon Valley data privacy company raised $4 million led by Together Fund, bringing its total to $5 million.
Its deck resists the temptation to explain the engineering, presenting instead why existing privacy tools fail in AI environments, then architecture diagrams and named enterprise deployments. Early customer names do a lot of work in infrastructure pitches, because one recognizable logo answers the question of whether anyone will actually deploy this.
8. clare&me, €3.7M
The Berlin mental health company raised €1 million in pre-seed funding in 2021 and €3.7 million in August 2024 led by YZR, with Antler continuing and grant funding from the German research ministry, Berlin’s development bank and EU programmes.
The deck’s strongest section is evidence. Rather than resting on engagement metrics, it leans on a feasibility study with Charité Berlin and a clinical positioning, then connects consumer adoption to insurer and clinic distribution. In regulated markets, proof of outcome is the traction slide.
9. Exakt Health, €2.2M seed
The Berlin physiotherapy app, founded by former N26 staff, raised $1.5 million in 2022 and €2.2 million in September 2024 led by Barmenia Next Strategies, the venture arm of the insurer.
What makes this deck instructive is that the distribution partner is the story. A single partnership put the app in front of 300,000 privately insured policyholders, and its status as an approved medical device in Europe removes a risk investors would otherwise price in. When your growth depends on a channel rather than on paid acquisition, the deck should say so plainly.
10. The exception: Carta, $7M Series A
There is a good reason to avoid the canonical decks. Everyone has seen them, the companies are unrecognizable from what they pitched, and the lessons have been flattened by repetition. Carta is where I make the exception, because the founder published the deck himself along with what he learned, which almost nobody does.
In November 2014, eShares closed a $7 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures, with Spark Capital taking a smaller piece after offering to lead. The company, founded in 2012 by Henry Ward and Manu Kumar, went on to raise around $1.16 billion in total and reached a $7.4 billion valuation at its peak, before a harder stretch that included shutting its private stock exchange in 2024. The deck is worth reading precisely because it was written when none of that was obvious and the company was selling something most investors did not think was a market.
Four things in it still hold up. The ask is stated plainly on the cover rather than buried at the end, which is rarer than it should be. Growth carries the argument, with month-on-month revenue growth doing more persuasive work than any market-size slide could. The case studies name individual customers with the revenue each is expected to produce, so the reader can do the arithmetic themselves instead of being handed a projection. And the roadmap slide extends deliberately beyond the initial product, showing how a cap table tool becomes financial infrastructure, which is the move every infrastructure company has to make in a deck if it wants to be funded at venture scale.
Ward’s own retrospective is as useful as the slides. His summary, that fundraising is a filtering exercise rather than a popularity contest, matches what the engagement data shows a decade later. Most investors decide quickly and quietly, so the deck’s job is to reach the small number who were already inclined to believe you, not to convert the ones who were not.
What these ten have in common
Taken together with the attention data, a few rules emerge that are more useful than another slide-by-slide template.
Build for 77 seconds, then for four minutes. The first three or four slides get most of the attention that exists, so the strongest proof you have belongs there. Decks that put traction in the first three slides collect around 20% more views, and almost nobody rewards you for a well-constructed climax on slide 18.
Twelve pages is the sweet spot. Decks of twelve pages attract the most views and the highest rate of return visits, and 46% of founders already land between nine and sixteen. Longer than fifteen and engagement falls off sharply.
Substitute proof deliberately when you cannot show revenue. Every company here does it differently: FINBOURNE uses institutional logos, Protecto uses named deployments, clare&me uses a clinical study, Exakt Health uses an insurance partnership, and Vybe labels where each pipeline deal came from. Absence of metrics is not the problem, absence of evidence is.
Match the structure to the market’s maturity. In a crowded category, argue by elimination the way Vybe does. In a mature one, reframe the question the way Tracebit does. In a new one, teach the market first the way Natcap does. Founders get this backwards constantly, explaining an obvious market at length while skipping the differentiation that the reader actually needs.
Do the unglamorous thing and include financials. Only about four decks in ten do, which makes it a cheap way to look like the adult in a partner meeting, particularly at Series A.
Write for the person who has to retell your story. The team slide is the most-read page in the entire dataset, at around 5.7 seconds, which tells you how quickly a reader is deciding whether you are the right people. Everything after that is giving your champion the sentences they will use when you are not in the room.
The honest counterweight
None of this makes the deck the reason a round closes. Half of opened decks collect five views or fewer, which is usually a targeting problem rather than a design problem, and no amount of sequencing rescues a company without a market. A deck cannot manufacture conviction that the business does not support.
What it can do is lose rounds that a good company deserved to win, by burning its first 77 seconds on a market-size slide, by hiding the proof on page fourteen, or by leaving the investor with nothing quotable for the Monday meeting. That asymmetry is the whole argument for treating the deck as a first-class part of the raise rather than the thing you assemble the weekend before.
