Not PowerPoint alone: collaborative presentation creation platform Pitch raises $85M

Knowing your pitch like a prayer is the right thing to do. But it is not always possible for a founder to present a project in person or to add visuals to a speech — a presentation is needed. Writing the TOR, giving it to the designer, and then using it to make changes are a lot of unnecessary iterations. Besides, there are often several people in a team involved in creating it. To help a startup, another startup comes to the rescue.

Pitch, a platform that creates presentations for teams, raised $85M at a Series B with a valuation of $600M. The lead investors were Lakestar and Tiger Global, with participation from Index Ventures and Thrive Capital. The funding will be used to further develop the underlying technology and products to cover the entire presentation creation workflow, as well as to expand the possible size of the teams. In total, the project has raised $135M to date.

The company speaks of tens of thousands of teams creating around 125 000 account jobs on the platform, including Grammarly, Superhuman and Notion.

The startup is thus reinventing the most common tool for creating presentations, PowerPoint, by adding a cloud-based base for collaboration and making it easier to use the core design functionality.

This is, on the one hand, a continuation of the trend towards optimizing resources and reducing the chain of interactions in product creation. Such examples include the success of the Copymonkey.ai project, whose AI engine makes it possible to partially eliminate the services of copywriters.

On the other hand, it is another example of how the pandemic, which has forced companies to move to remote work, has given a boost to productivity tools startups. An example of this trend can be seen in the strong growth of another remote team collaboration project from Russia, Miro. It recently made the list of fastest-growing productivity apps, where it was second only to giant Amazon Business, but ahead of several other unicorns.