REUTERS/Satish Kumar
Careem CEO, Mudassir Sheikha
- Seed funding is a vital phase in the life of a startup.
- The relatively modest amount of funding, usually a few million dollars, provides the capital to turn a brilliant idea on a napkin into a real product.
- Getting seed funding means pitching to a broad spectrum of potential investors, from "angel" investors to early-stage venture capital firms.
- Here are the pitch decks that the latest crop of startups have successfully used to raise seed funding and take their business to the next level.
- Business Insider regularly interviews startups about fundraising strategies and collects the pitch decks that helped them raise funding. You can read them all by subscribing to BI Prime.
- AceUp: Here's the pitch deck that's helping this 28-year-old first-time entrepreneur raise over $2 million in seed funding to make professional coaching more accessible
- Airbnb: The first investor pitch deck for $31 billion startup Airbnb, which has raised over $3 billion and is nearing an IPO
- Careem: Here's the pitch deck Careem used to secure its first round of venture capital, which led its first investors to a 100x return when Uber bought the company this year
- Foursquare: Foursquare is 10 years old and has raised over $240 million. Here's what the startup's first investor pitch deck looked like in 2009, before it raised any money.
- Holloway: Here's the pitch deck that Holloway used to raise $4.6 million from NEA and the New York Times for its online 'how-to' manual business
- Include: The deck a 23-year-old Croatian entrepreneur used to raise 2 million euros to turn its smart benches into a worldwide ad network
- Octi: The deck an LA entrepreneur used to raise $7 million for his new social-network idea
- Osano: The deck a Texas entrepreneur used to raise millions for a startup inspired by Zuckerberg's congressional testimony
- Pillar: The deck that Pillar, a student-loan-management startup, used to score $5.5 million from Kleiner Perkins and an A-list of Silicon Valley backers
- Public Goods: This deck helped a New York startup raise millions to build a direct-to-consumer marketplace that fills the gap between Amazon and Walmart
- The Predictive Index: This deck helped a 65-year-old company raise $50 million, and show investors why its personality-testing service was suddenly growing like a hot startup
- Swit: Here's the pitch deck that convinced investors to pour $6 million into a startup trying to take on Slack and Asana despite entering the market years late
- Uber: Uber's original deck from a decade ago shows just how much the ride-hailing giant has changed
- UpTop: The deck a New York startup used to raise $5.5 million to expand its apartment-rental service
- Winnie: The deck that raised millions for 2 ex-Googlers whose startup helps new millennial parents find childcare
- Zestful: The deck that helped employee-rewards startup Zestful raise a $1.2 million seed round before it had any customers