- Growth Warrior Capital is launching a new tool Elevo, an AI-powered pitch deck generator.
- The firm's managing partner, Promise Phelon, came up with the idea to help founders.
Promise Phelon wants to help startup founders make their pitches to investors stronger.
As the managing partner of Growth Warrior Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund, Phelon invests in founders that have great ideas for what she calls "dangerous" startups that could "fundamentally change the way we work, earn, and build wealth." Most of these startups are in categories like fintech, insurance tech, artificial intelligence, and the future of work, but their founders are often overlooked by other venture capitalists because of their race or gender, she said.
For Phelon as an investor, the sheer amount of pitch decks that she was sorting through began to become overwhelming. "It's hard to cut through the noise, and you have limited time to view each presentation," she said. "I wanted to spend less time deciphering narratives and more times meeting with founders and CEOs."
Luckily, Phelon had a secret weapon on her team — her venture partner Ashley Pilipiszyn, a former technical director who was one of the first employees at OpenAI in 2018. Phelon's background as a long-time operator for marketing tech companies like JazzHR and TapInfluence also gave her the skills needed to launch a new product as a VC. "I thought, what if we could take the most successful pitches from a VC's perspective and from founder outcomes, like getting the valuation they wanted or getting funded quickly, and build a generative product that that enable you to do that quickly?"
To solve this problem for founders and investors, Growth Warrior Capital is launching a generative AI-powered pitch deck builder, called Elevo. Elevo's waitlist officially launches today, Phelon said, and founders can sign up for first access once the product officially goes live in October.
The team sourced hundreds of pitch decks from publicly available databases and from reach outs to other VC firms for great startup decks they had on hand to train Elevo's AI model, she said. When using Elevo, founders put in certain details, like the funding stage they're trying to raise for, details about the team, the product, and market size. Elevo will then generate a pitch deck for them with the key details that VCs are looking for. "When I look at a team slide, for example, I'm trying to assess founder-market fit, problem-founder fit, how pedigreed is this team, how does their background match what they're looking to do," Phelon said.
Elevo will be sensitive to which stage a founder is planning to raise at, and will prompt a founder with targeted questions that can educate them on what VCs are looking for at each stage.
The designs are typically simple and the slide numbers are short, but that's oftentimes what investors who see dozens of decks a week prefer. "You want the pitch to not tell the entire story, but you want it just to be enough so the VC says, 'I understand it, it matches what we care about, and I'm intrigued,'" she said.
Phelon and Growth Warrior Capital have no plans to monetize the deck builder tool once it launches, she said, likening it to other venture products that firms have launched, such as the Signal database by NFX. "We want the ecosystem to be more productive, with the side benefit that we're able to see pitches that are better and faster for us," she said.