Alto Solutions Seed Stage

This is the Alto Solutions pitch deck to raise a $5.4m seed round in 2019.

About

Alto Solutions delivers an easy-to-use, automated process for investing in alternatives with IRA savings. It aims to democratize alternative asset investing. AltoIRA offers an easy-to-use investing platform that empowers everyday investors to diversify their IRAs by investing in alternative assets such as private equity, venture capital, real estate, loans, and cryptocurrency.

Offering Traditional, Roth, SEP, and Crypto IRAs, Alto is bringing alternative investments to the mainstream. Everyday investors can now easily and cost-effectively access their retirement savings to invest in assets once reserved solely for high-net-worth individuals.

It was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee.

Making alternatives not so alternative.

That, in a nutshell, summarizes Alto’s goal of disrupting retirement investing.

The Nashville, Tennessee-based startup makes it easier to invest long-term savings in areas that are typically tough for Main Street to access, such as startups, private companies, and real estate. The fintech eases the process of connecting investors and those looking to raise capital.

It’s a big market opportunity for Alto, as only 1% of the $9 trillion in individual retirement accounts is invested in alternatives. Eric Satz, the CEO of Alto, previously told Business Insider as much as 20% of all retirement savings, a $28 trillion market, could end up being put into alternatives.

“If we’re going to dig ourselves out of the retirement hole that we currently find ourselves in, then it has to be a scalable solution, which for the most part eliminates people and paper and allows for a very cost effective, price competitive product,” Satz said. “And that’s what I think we’ve done.”

As a sign of increasing interest in Alto, Satz pointed to the spike in business the company has seen recently. After doing $10 million in transactions in the first year, Satz said the company has surpassed that amount in the past three months alone.

It’s not just customers that have taken notice of Alto, as the company has also caught the eye of some high-profile investors. Tony James, Blackstone’s executive vice chairman; Jake Gibson, the cofounder of NerdWallet; and Sequoia Capital have all participated in Alto’s seed round, which raised $5.4 million during raises in March and August of this year.

Source: BI and Crunchbase.

Funding rounds

Pitch deck review summary

The founders are smart, but the deck isn’t amazing. They write essays on every slide which is a lot of effort to get through. They fail the flick test.

They have the potential to do better.

Structured summary review

Words

There are far too many on every single slide. Never write paragraphs.

Slide length

Alto Solutions have 19 slides in their pitch deck. This is slightly on the short end.

Headers

Horrible. Never write the checklist slide name as your title. Write what the point it.

Appearance

It would have been solid if it weren’t for the terrible background color that hampers the contrast of text which makes reading harder.

Narrative

If you don’t use the headers, you don’t have a narrative. The slide order is wrong in this deck which is uncommon.

Structure

The logo should be far smaller on each slide.

Slides

There’s nothing on their go-to-market strategy, their actual market size, defensibility etc.

Slide by slide review

The cover is best practice. They seem to have a left a note on the cover?

Fantastic. Very few startups explain what they do right at the start. This is a huge win you should apply yourself.

Sam Altman is famous, so adding this tweet isn’t a terrible idea. This is one of the only slides I allow you to stick a stock image, so this is better. It’s always good to find someone to say what you want to say instead of claiming it yourself.

I don’t get a feeling of the value proposition, but the wording is solid.

Oh god, they’re writers. All the slides are mini-essays with charts on the right. It’s a bit tedious to read.

Don’t copy and paste charts. Put in the effort to natively format them.

This slide is an industry one to set the content of the deck.

They keep mentioning alternatives, but they haven’t spelled it out. Why are alternatives better?

As mentioned on the last slide, this is how they should have natively formatted the slide.

I’m still missing why alternatives is important here.

They explain alternatives now. I feel this should have come earlier, or explained that all those assets have low return potential.

The text should have been explained visually. It’s not dumb content, just never write a paragraph other than on the intro slide.

Don’t make statements like the market is shrinking- prove it.

They still haven’t explained why it needs to be done now. Why not 3 years ago?

Perhaps the Jobs Act is the why now?

I don’t know what alto does, so they shouldn’t explain why they start with crowdfunding.

If you use graphs, but a header on them and explain what the point is so I don’t have to figure it out. Thinking is bad.

I feel how it works should be clearer.

I would like to see examples of who everyone is.

It’s fine, just a bit dull visually.

So they don’t have any clients yet? Rather than “where we are” say where you are…

Ok, so they do have clients? The order is off.

The milestones they want to achieve make sense. This should be at the end when talking about the ask.

Always add pictures of the team. Bonus point, hire a kid to take consistent photos of everyone on the team.

Why isn’t where they are going and the future together?

This should have been a lot earlier on. They only have three competitors? That’s bull. Doing nothing is still competition.

I have these slides where there are ticks for the startup and no crosses at all. It implies either there is no focus, or they are selective with their choice of variables, which is usually the case.

Eh, hate these slides. Put in an investment thesis or the three things to remember to close it out.

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