Tag Archives: Pitch Decks

An adequately made Startup Pitch Deck remains the perfect tool for funding for startups. Given that more than $445 billion went into startups all over the world in 2023, the competition is very stiff. Investors receive a lot of pitch deck presentations each year, out of which only 1 percent of the startups actually end up getting funded. Therefore, a data-driven and visually attractive pitch deck is crucial for distinguishing yourself.

As per CB Insights, 42% of startups fail due to the lack of market need, while 29% fail due to the inability to raise funds.

This article shows trends, key components, and future opportunities, along with recommended graphs and statistics for better visualization.

The Importance of a Startup Pitch Deck

A pitch deck is a compact presentation that offers investors an overview of the startup, business model, and growth potential.

The investor spends an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds studying a Startup Pitch Deck.

65% of investors make funding decisions based on the first three slides.

Startups with visually appealing decks are 30% more likely to receive funding.

 

Trends in Startup Pitch Decks

Some of the trends taking place in Startup Pitch Decks are as follows:

Current Trends in Startup Pitch Deck

Current Trends in Startup Pitch Deck

Data-Driven Storytelling

Investors fully rely on quantitative data. A report shows that pitch decks with 30% or more data-related slides attracted investor engagement 3 times longer than PowerPoint decks with less than the mentioned percentage of data elements.

Shorter and More Concise Startup Pitch Deck

Research indicates that the optimum pitch-deck length has declined from 19 slides in 2019 to 12 to 14 slides in 2024. Shorter decks will maintain an investor’s attention and keep the message sharp.

Financials and Market Size

According to a survey conducted in 2023, funding expectations and market potential attract the most attention from 70% of investors when evaluating startups.

Financials (24% of total viewing time)

Market Opportunity (21%)

Traction and Growth (18%)

Sustainability and ESG Considerations

Startups engaged in environmental, social, and governance issues attract 20% more investor interest than firms ignoring these agendas. Sustainable business models are indeed the new sweet for every VC and impact investor.

Region-Wise Startup Pitch Deck Trends

There are various trends shaping the landscape in the Pitch Deck arena. The regional composition of the emerging trends is as follows:

Region-wise Startup Pitch Deck Trends

Region-wise Startup Pitch Deck Trends

North America

60% of investments target AI and SaaS startups.

Much attention from investors tends to be on early funding rounds.

Seed-stage startups secured an average of $2.5 million in 2023.

Europe

45% of funding for startups is directed toward sustainability.

Focus on green technology and fintech.

With a 30% growth rate in 2023, investments are seen in government grants and venture capital.

Asia-Pacific

The sectors containing e-commerce and fintech account for 55% of total investment into startups.

China and India are the leaders in startup funding, having invested more than $80 billion in 2023.

Startups focused on logistics and AI-enabled automation have seen a 40% year-on-year growth.

Essential Components of a Successful Startup Pitch Deck

Statement of the Problem

Indicate precisely what problem is being solved by your startup.

Example: “95% of online shoppers abandon their carts due to lack of real-time support.”

Solution

The idea should show a fresh, creative way of thinking.

A visual showing the state before and after must be provided to reveal the change.

Market Opportunity

The ability to grow is very appealing to anyone looking to invest.

Example: It is expected that the worldwide market for AI will grow to $1.5 trillion by 2030.

Business Model

How to earn money?

For example, subscription, freemium, B2B SaaS, etc.

Data: Subscription-based startups grow 5x faster than straight-sell companies.

Traction & Milestones

Investors prefer startups with proven traction.

Example: We achieved $1 million ARR in 12 months.

The user base grew 300% in 6 months.

Competitive Analysis

Compare your startup with competitors using a SWOT analysis.

Use a comparison matrix to highlight advantages.

Financial Projections

3–5-year revenue forecast.

Break-even analysis.

Example data:  Projected revenue of $50M by Year 5. Expected 40% gross margin.

Funding Requirements & Use of Funds

Clearly define how much funding is needed and how it will be used.

Example: Seeking $5 million in funding for product development (40%), marketing (30%), and team expansion (30%).

Team & Advisors

Highlight key team members’ expertise.

Data: 75% of VC-backed startups attribute success to a strong founding team.

Future Opportunities in Startup Pitch Deck

Interactive & AI-Powered Startup Pitch Deck

65% of investors prefer decks with interactive elements.

AI-powered analytics can track investor engagement.

Personalized Startup Pitch Deck for Different Investors

80% of successful startups tailor pitch decks to specific investors.

Blockchain & Smart Contracts for Fundraising

Token-based fundraising is expected to grow 400 percent by 2027.

 

Something that presents a momentous proposal in startup culture is almost a guarantee. With a clean and simple design story backing the investment, a deck could lower the startup’s chance of obtaining funding. Financial projections presented in the deck must strive for accuracy to convince the lonesome angel. Leveraging emerging technologies and trends like AI-driven analytics, sustainability, and blockchain fundraising will provide even greater opportunities in the coming years.

With investors spending less than 4 minutes per deck, crafting a clear, engaging, and data-rich presentation is not just a necessity—it’s a game-changer.

Magistral’s Services for Startup Pitch Deck 

Pitch Deck Creation

Offering an irresistible design and strategic format that emphasizes storytelling skill to get your startup some merit by showcasing high-quality data visualization and infographics. Graphics in the pitch deck simplify complex information for your audience to digest and allow investors to gain insights into the most important aspects quickly.

Market Research & Analysis

A well-researched market opportunity strengthens a startup’s investment appeal. Magistral conducts in-depth industry research, competitor analysis, and market sizing, including Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Available Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). These insights help startups position themselves effectively and provide investors with a clear understanding of the market potential and competitive landscape.

Financial Modeling & Projections

Investors need a clear picture of a startup’s financial viability, and Magistral helps build robust financial models. Our services pertain to revenue forecasting, cost structure assignment, break-even analysis, and evaluation metrics. By putting in place realistic and data-supported financial projections, startups are also able to establish credibility and support their sustainability in the long run.

Investor Targeting & Strategy

As crucial as a thorough pitch is the identification of the right investors. Magistral helps startups choose potential investors depending on the industry, stage of funding, and investment interests. They also refine messaging to fit the different types of investors so that the startup value proposition resonates with the worthy, increasing the likelihood of getting the funds.

Business Strategy & USP Refinement

Business Strategy & USP Refinement show that this sitting unique startup model and selling proposition stand apart from competition. Thus, assistance comes from Magistral in the business strategy refinement, strengthening value propositions, and optimizing revenue generation streams.

 

About Magistral Consulting

Magistral Consulting has helped multiple funds and companies in outsourcing operations activities. It has service offerings for Private Equity, Venture Capital, Family Offices, Investment Banks, Asset Managers, Hedge Funds, Financial Consultants, Real Estate, REITs, RE funds, Corporates, and Portfolio companies. Its functional expertise is around Deal origination, Deal Execution, Due Diligence, Financial Modelling, Portfolio Management, and Equity Research

For setting up an appointment with a Magistral representative visit www.magistralconsulting.com/contact

About the Author

The article is authored by the Marketing Department of Magistral Consulting. For any business inquiries, you can reach out to prabhash.choudhary@magistralconsulting.com

Common mistakes include overcomplicated slides, excessive text, lack of financial details, and unclear business models. Investors prefer data-driven, visually compelling, and concise presentations.

Using data-driven storytelling, high-quality visuals, and interactive elements increases engagement. AI-powered pitch decks that track investor interest can provide real-time insights for improvement.

Trends include active pitch decks, AI-powered data study, block-chain money raising, and ESG-focused funds. Startups that use factors of sustainability draw 20% more interest from backers, showing the rising value of ESG points.

Subscription-based models, such as B2B SaaS, are preferred by investors because they offer predictable revenue and higher scalability. Research shows that subscription startups grow 5x faster than one-time purchase models.

Introduction

Private Equity (PE) consulting has been around for a while. Many consulting firms have practices offering private equity consulting services. It is interesting to note that even global consulting firms rely on offshoring to a great extent to deliver value to private equity clients on their most pressing issues. Offshoring reduces costs of consulting firms and some of it must be passed onto the clients (we hope!!). But what if all the advantages of offshoring could be passed onto the clients directly?

Read further to know more!!

Private Equity Consulting and Offshoring: Why it’s a match made in heaven?

Management Consulting as an industry has been around for more than 100 years on the back of its solid value proposition for clients. It brings in expertise, experience, political leverage, data sources, network, and usually signs business outcome-based projects with the clients. Usually, benefits outweigh the costs by 3X to 10X.

Private Equity Consulting and Offshoring

Private Equity Consulting and Offshoring brought together

Offshoring also picked up with the advent of the internet. As the work was possible with the help of the internet and advanced communication options, offshoring started to make sense for low-end jobs like call centers and data entry. It was followed by IT and now it is the turn of high-end research, analytics, and consulting jobs. The value proposition of offshoring is cost efficiency and scale. In most cases, offshoring also results in improvements in terms of quality and delivery apart from cost-cutting.

When we combine the forces, we have the impact of consulting with the cost advantages of offshoring, making it an unbeatable value proposition for clients in their marketplace. Management consulting overheads like weekly flights for consultants, high-end hotels for stay, and highly-priced consultants, all of which are paid by the clients are reduced by remote working and service delivery. At the same time, task offshoring to a group with all the expertise in a given industry brings a scale that can be taken advantage of, by smaller clients.

Business Outcomes for Private Equity Industry and the Services Offered

Major work streams at all private equity companies, big or small, comprise of following workstreams:

Fundraising and marketing or investor relations

Deal origination

Deal execution along with due diligence; and 

Portfolio management to get into the operational details of portfolio companies to make it more valuable

Private Equity Consulting Business Outcomes

Private Equity Consulting Business Outcomes

Magistral's Service Offerings for Private Equity

Magistral’s service offerings for Private Equity

Here is how Private Equity consulting helps in these workstreams

Fund Raising and Marketing/ Investor Relations

A fund is established when it has a healthy pipeline of potential investors apart from the existing ones. This is the area where most emerging managers struggle. The game does not even start if the firm is not able to raise the angel fund. However, like everything else in life, robust results need time and consistent efforts. PE consulting helps reach out to the investors and maintain a continuous touch-point to drive home the value proposition of the fund and thus enable successful fundraising rounds.

 

The services that help in fundraising are

Fundraising documentation

Fundraising requires a lot of documentation. Sometimes it could be enormous for an emerging manager. At the same time, it needs to be streamlined for established managers. Magistral helps prepare documents like Private Placement Memorandums (PPMs)/ Confidential Information Memorandums (CIMs), pitch decks, financial models and projections, teasers, and strategy and marketing documentation.

Investor profiling and reach-out

Funds specializing in different areas have different ideal profiles for investors or limited partners. Magistral helps in profiling and reach out to these investors. Magistral also has an in-house database that carries leads of more than 15000+ Limited Partners (LPs) and General Partners (GPs). It can also access databases of other players if the task needs it.

Design and Data Support

Magistral has an in-house design team that streamlines the PowerPoint designs and makes them consistent with the global marketing standards. It’s like we receive the content in raw form, sometimes scribbles from a notepad or whiteboard, and the output is a well-designed PowerPoint that could directly be sent to investors. Similarly, pitch decks and PPMs could also be designed to look more powerful visually. Likewise, data could be streamlined related to investors or CRM systems that the clients use.

Newsletters

Multiple touch-points with investors mark content like Newsletters, PoV documents, Industry reports, and market research. Magistral has experience working with hundreds of clients working on these assignments. It has access to resources like secondary sources, interviews with the panel of experts, and triangulations to come up with market sizes, etc. Worthy content establishes the authority of the Private Equity fund in the eyes of accredited investors.

Sustainable Investment and Impact Assessment

We have a specific service offering around ESG analysis, sustainable investments, and impact assessments of the current or potential assets acquired by the Private Equity firms.

Deal Origination

Deal origination services make sure that the focus of the GP is on the suitable targets and populate the deal pipeline with more appropriate deals, to be taken up as and when required. Picking up the right deals is the lifeblood of PE operations. It’s by picking up the right deals that a GP can offer superlative returns to its LP investors. Magistral helps with Deal Flow support and Inbound deal flow analysis.

The deal origination related services offered are:

Industry tracking and landscaping

A Private Equity firm needs to scan the environment for investing continually. It needs to track its key markets, geographies, and industry regularly to take advantage of emerging trends. Magistral has helped multiple clients in tracking industries like healthcare, SaaS, blockchain, cybersecurity, heavy engineering, and many others.

Potential target identification

A list of suitable potential targets is generated using secondary and primary sources. As per the investment thesis, the targets satisfy a host of customizable criteria like revenue, profits, employees, industry, geography, and being open for investments. Secondary sources include databases, whereas primary sources are industry associations, accelerators, angel investor groups, etc.

Target company profiling

Once the list is generated for potential targets, the next step is to shortlist the companies of interest and go for a deeper dive.  A target company is profiled for its business details, strategy, latest developments, management, SWOT, Porter’s 5 forces, and other customized information. Understanding the openness of the company for an investor on the board is also studied at this stage.

Target pipeline management

For deals to be continuously happening, the pipeline needs to be populated continuously. There should be deals in all stages of deal-making. That is ensured by filling the targets in the funnel on an ongoing basis.

ESG Analysis

ESG or impact analysis is more critical than it was ever before. It’s imperative then that Private Equity firms evaluate the deals for ESG fitments. A company that performs better on ESG frameworks is a more sustainable investment and makes a far-reaching impact on the society and communities it serves.

Inbound deal flow management

If a firm receives lots of inbound inquiries, there needs to be an agency to sort out the worthy opportunities from the non-serious ones. Magistral matches the opportunities with the GPs investment thesis and brings forward the best deals.

Summarizing and preparing IMs:

If start-ups send IMs, the same need to be summarized for discussion with the investment committee. Magistral summarizes the Investment memos into investcomms decks for quick and effective decision making.

Deal Viability Analysis: This involves getting into the nitty-gritty of a deal, identifying red flags both inside out and outside in, to make sure the deal produces the impact, which is the aim of the investment to start with. This is achieved from the exhaustive and comprehensive market and company research.

Deal Execution and Due Diligence

Deal execution and due diligence ensure the right investment decisions to produce significant returns, identifying risks for better planning post-investment or M&A.

Here the services are about providing all the foresight and intelligence to make the right decisions. The primary service offerings here are:

Target company due diligence

Here, Magistral takes access to the data rooms and analyses the information to produce highly relevant deliverables and insights. Due diligence includes financial, operational, and ESG related aspects of a firm. Magistral works with both Private Equity firms and Investee companies. It prepares Due Diligence Questionnaires (DDQs) and collects information from the investee companies, either directly or indirectly.

Industry Research

Here, industry research is more specific and has to do with the target company’s operations. The industry in which the target operates and details like trends, SWOT, Porter’s five forces, key competition, pricing trends, news. etc. are captured to provide a holistic view about the industry in which the target company operates

Detailed company profiling and competitive intelligence

In this stage of the company profile, details are captured from multiple sources like ex-employees, management, existing employees, vendors, competition, investors, and industry stakeholders. Also, information related to competition and their strategy is captured using primary and secondary sources.

Investment Memorandums

If the investment needs to be made with other co-investors, standard documentation is applicable like Investment Memorandum, Confidential Information memorandum, Pitch Deck, and Financial Models.

Modeling and Valuations

This exercise ensures that deal is made at the right prices so that there is a significant upside for the investment returns. Magistral has prepared 100+ financial models for valuations in industries like SaaS, tech, healthcare, IT, manufacturing, B2C retail, fashion, chemicals, and e-commerce. Here the information and assumptions required to prepare a financial model are captured from detailed discussions with the client. The models in which Magistral has expertise include and are not limited to 3 parts financial models, LBO analysis, DCF modeling, Real Estate modeling, precedent transaction analysis, comparable analysis, and impact analysis.

Portfolio Management and Fund Management

Portfolio Management aims at maximizing the value of the investment in a company by a Private Equity firm. This is achieved by supporting various tasks of the acquired company to reach more customers, hence improving revenue or reducing operations’ costs. Fund Management is about streamlining the functions of the fund itself to focus on the core tasks of investing and fundraising.

Here the services are:

ESG Compliance Monitoring

Magistral, after assessing the ESG maturity of an investee company, suggests a set of metrics monitored periodically after the investment is made. The data is collected on these metrics and reported to the board and management along with investors every quarter.

Outsourced CFO

Outsourced CFO services are relevant for both funds and the portfolio companies, specifically in the cases where the PE firm invests in start-ups or smaller firms. These companies may not be in a position to invest in a full-time CFO and thus may go for an outsourced CFO that is fractional and provides the operational and cost flexibility. Sometimes Financial Process and Accounting could be outsourced, while CFO could be kept in-house. These tasks include accounting, bookkeeping, administration, procurement, and preparation of financial statements

Outsourced Fund Administration

This service is specifically for funds and takes care of all the administrative aspects of the fund like fund accounting, expense monitoring, trade reconciliation, distribution waterfalls, taxes, fees, incentives, expenses, etc.

Strategy and Business Development support

After the investments, most PE firms focus on growing the revenues of the portfolio companies. This is done through a slew of interventions on strategy and marketing. Magistral supports these activities by providing services like consumer and market studies, new product or market development, lead generation, which is critical in the B2B space, and finding follow-on acquisition or buyer for the investee companies.

And this is how Private Equity consulting joins forces with offshoring to provide an unbeatable competitive advantage for our clients.

About Magistral

Magistral Consulting has helped multiple funds and companies in outsourcing operations activities. It has service offerings for Private Equity, Venture Capital, Family OfficesInvestment BanksAsset Managers, Hedge Funds, Financial Consultants, Real Estate, REITs, RE fundsCorporates and Portfolio companies. Its functional expertise is around Deal originationDeal Execution, Due Diligence, Financial ModelingPortfolio Management and Equity Research

For setting up an appointment with a Magistral representative visit www.magistralconsulting.com/contact

About the Author

The Author, Prabhash Choudhary is the CEO of Magistral Consulting and can be reached at Prabhash.choudhary@magistralconsutling.com for any queries or business inquiries.