Anonymized snapshot — company name withheld under NDA.
Challenge
The founders were two ex-bank operators building a treasury automation product for mid-market CFOs. They had a working platform, four paying customers at $60k–$120k ACV, and two LOIs from Fortune 500 finance teams. What they did not have was a deck that sold the wedge.
The version they came in with opened with TAM and a product demo. The story moved from problem to platform to roadmap. By slide nine the reader did not know why a CFO would rip out Kyriba or Treasura for this product specifically.
They had been in conversations with three seed funds for six weeks. Two passed without a second meeting.
Approach
Week one was narrative. We interviewed both founders for two hours each and pulled out a sharper claim than the one they had been leading with: they were not replacing treasury platforms, they were sitting next to them and automating the manual reconciliation work that happens the day after payments clear. That was the wedge. It was buried on slide eleven in the old deck.
We restructured the story around three claims a CFO could test in thirty minutes: the manual work is bigger than it looks, the automation is possible today, and the first-customer data backs both.
Week two we designed twelve slides. The product section became a single annotated workflow diagram drawn from the customer's actual process. The traction slide used real ACV and expansion numbers, not a projection chart. The TAM slide got cut to one line on the market-sizing page.
Week three was coaching. We ran a deck-defense rehearsal over video, then a ninety-minute investor Q&A hot-seat. The founders left with the script and the answers to the four questions every investor had been asking.
Outcome
The first re-pitch after delivery turned into a term sheet within three weeks. The second fund the founders re-engaged matched it. They closed a $2.0M seed round 49 days after final delivery, led by a US-based fintech specialist with two follow-on commitments from strategic angels.
What changed in the deck
- Opening slide moved from TAM to the wedge claim, with one sentence of customer proof.
- Product section collapsed from four slides into one annotated workflow diagram.
- Traction slide replaced projection charts with a three-customer expansion cohort.
- Go-to-market section added a single "why now" slide tied to a regulatory change in late 2025.
- The roadmap slide moved to the appendix. It was slowing down the story.