March 27, 2024

Pitch Deck Teardown: Protecto’s $4M seed deck

Reading Time: 4 minutes

In an era where data is king and its volume and complexity are exploding, Protecto aims to eliminate the long-standing dilemma businesses face between leveraging AI’s power while ensuring data privacy. As the adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT skyrockets, wayward data becomes easier to find, process and do naughty things with. Protecto’s APIs are designed to protect sensitive data across the AI life cycle while maintaining its utility.

The company announced it raised a $4 million seed funding round led by Together Fund, with contributions from Better Capital, FortyTwo VC, Arali Ventures and Speciale Invest. This round boosts Protecto’s total funding to $5 million.

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Slides in this deck

Cover slide
Problem slide
Urgency slide
Platform interstitial slide
Technology overview slide
Results slide
Solution slide
Case study slide 1
Case study slide 2
Competitive alternatives slide
Team slide
Go to market slide
Roadmap slide
Ask and use of funds slide

Three things to love about Protecto’s pitch deck

There’s a lot missing from this deck, but there are some good things to highlight, too.

Competitive alternatives

This slide doesn’t talk about direct competitors (there are one or two). But the company does a good job showing this information anyway:

Understanding and analyzing these competitive alternatives can be powerful as an additional layer of insight, uncovering potential opportunities for differentiation and helping to identify unmet customer needs. Having said all of that, Protecto should have included direct competitors, but this slide is still a great example of how a startup can explore its position in the market.

Helloooo, team

This team slide is so solid — the only downside is that they put it as the 11th slide:

According to his LinkedIn, CEO Amar Kanagaraj spent almost eight years at Microsoft, including a stint in search and AI. CTO Baskaran Alagarsamy spent seven years as a ‘manager’ at Apple India. I’d have loved to see more detail on exactly what he was managing there (and why this slide says 18 years, while his LinkedIn says seven years), but this is the beginning of a really solid team. If I were investing in this space, a team of this caliber would pique my interest and I would probably set up a meeting.

An elegant solution

Privacy and AI can get brain-achingly complicated, fast. I appreciate Protecto’s efforts to simplify it to a point where most people can fathom what’s going on in the tech.

Three things that Protecto could have improved

Pitch deck design isn’t usually that important, but the design of this deck is particularly bad. There are also far more serious flaws hidden among these pages.

These case studies aren’t case studies

In a 14-slide deck, Protecto wastes slide 4 as an interstitial (it just says ‘our platform’). It then wastes two slides with the title ‘case studies.’ However, a more accurate term would be ‘use cases.’

The headline of a slide is a promise the rest of the slide has to fulfill. In this case, I was let down both times, expecting one type of information and getting another. Proper case studies would have been really helpful in telling the story here.

Not a great ‘use of funds’ slide

Redactions aside, there’s not much here.

Expand engineering: Yes, but why, with what goal, and how much?
Drive marketing: Yes, but with what goals? By when? How much growth?
Build channel sales: Yes, but which channels are you going after first? Why?
Drive developer evangelism: What does that even mean?
Define the category: ???

Basically, all of this is just corporate-grade jargon. Even if the founders themselves buy it, investors probably won’t.

Yes, it’s scary to get predictive and specific. What if you fail? All plans and projections are predictions. We know. The investors know. The point is to show how you’re thinking through these predictions; investors can learn a lot about you as a founder. That’s extremely valuable — and not optional.

This is a brainstorm, not a plan

I would want to know what these integrations actually mean, and how customers find them. I’d like to understand how Snowflake and Databricks play into this plan. And what it is imagining with ‘solution integrators’?

This slide is a pile of words on a page, not an actionable, measurable go-to-market plan.

And then there’s all the stuff missing from the deck overall …

How big is the market for this sort of thing?
What traction do you have to date? Did the ‘case studies’ pay? If yes, how much? Did they continue to use the product?
There’s nothing about the business model: How will they charge? How much?
How is this defendable? Does the company have patents? Is there some sort of special magic sauce?

The problem with this deck overall is that it doesn’t explain why this problem is hard to solve and why this company is the one to solve it. Maybe it’s overly simplified in the deck, but just based on what’s here, I think I could round up a handful of developers and build most of this product over the span of a couple weeks. That cannot be true, can it? Because if so, there’s nothing here. But since that’s probably not the case, it means that there’s simply a problem with the storytelling. Yes, this is a big problem; now explain why it’s a hard-to-solve problem.

The full pitch deck

Ref: techcrunch

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