Anima Seed Stage

This is the Anima pitch deck to raise a $2.5m seed round in 2020.

About

Founded in 2018, Anima offers users a plug-in that it says allows web designers to bring their work on platforms like Sketch to life with minimal effort.

The Tel Aviv-based startup has already been through Y Combinator’s accelerator program — and is today used by teams at firms like Amazon, Google, Deloitte, and eBay.

This isn’t the first time a member of Anima’s founding team has made the headlines: CTO Or Arbel’s previous endeavor Yo, an app that only let users send the word “Yo” to their contacts, went viral in the early 2010s.

“We’ve all known each other since university. But when it became clear Yo wasn’t going to become the unicorn we all hoped it would be, we decided to work together,” Arbel previously told Business Insider.

He also spoke highly of the firm’s time with Y Combinator: “That was an intense but really incredible experience.

“It was like four months of just keeping our heads down, working long days on the product, and then spending a few days prepping for Demo Day … After Y Combinator, people are literally throwing checks at you.”

Funding Rounds

Pitch Deck Review Summary

For a snappy 11-slide deck, I think this is pretty good actually. They don’t get into a lot of details, but I feel that was their intention. I get the sense that the founders have a plan and they want a bit of cash to just get on with things. I would obviously want to chat with the team before I wrote them a check, but I would definitely take a meeting with them.

As far as short and undetailed decks go, there are definitely some things to be learned from this deck.

Structured Summary Review

Words

Some slides do not have enough words and some have far too many. They do a decent job with their copy.

Slide length

The deck has 13 slides. That is on the short end which can often be a negative for me, but the quality of their thoughts is robust.

One of the critical issues most founders have with decks is that they just can’t get to the fricking point and these guys don’t have that issue. That’s cool.

Headers

The headers are garbage. They are just a checklist of points. This is not how I like to write them, but having said that, no one teaches how to write headers properly.

Appearance

The deck is simple, nothing fancy, just how I like it. Goes to show if you set things out simply you do not need a designer.

Narrative

There is no narrative in the deck but they don’t really need one since the deck is so short. It’s really easy to flick through and have a fairly clear idea of what they do.

Structure

For what the deck is, the slide is structured very well.

Slides

They pretty much cover everything that they need to. They are very light on details, but they’re sort of saying we are ready to get on and do things, we aren’t raising a tonne of cash, so can you just hand over some dough so we can get to work. It would help a lot if they had explained the team so I would know if they were credible.

Slide by Slide Review

Don’t put the date in a deck.

Do not write the headers as a checklist. Do not write ‘The problem’ write what the actual problem is.

The only way I think a founder could make a worse slide than a slide with a sentence is just by putting a picture of a cat on it.

The problem slide is one of the most important ones in the deck as it gets investors to care about your business.

There are a lot of ways that they could prove the problem, but instead, there is a sentence.

Again with the crappy slide with just a sentence on it… I mean could they not even stick a screenshot of the product on it?

OK, this is a decent slide for once. Do they have a product? They could show a real example.

This isn’t a great example of doing market sizing or a go-to-market plan but at least they get to the point of what matters.

If they had written their GTM was getting designers to spread it I would have called BS, but the fact they have 100k in their community is impressive. At the earlier stage, you don’t have to go over the top if you have some useful facts.

This isn’t the best traction slide, but it’s not bad as things go. I would like to know how much people are paying though.

I generally don’t like roadmap slides but this isn’t bad. Typically it is ok for SaaS companies to have a roadmap, especially in the earlier days since that might be where all the money is going.

There is a rogue space in front of Adobe under H1 if you want to pay attention to detail.

Oh, H1 and H2 are half years. I thought it was a CSS joke…

Slide is ok, I like the fact that these guys get to the point. The content of the slides isn’t amazing, but I get an air of confidence from them which is positive.

Hm. Ok, they have a wall of text on the right. When I see that I just think “Sorry, not tonight honey”. I really do not want to read a wall like that. Also, the font size is far too small.

So they have an XY competition slide. The axis labels on them are decent. I don’t really like only seeing one company in a quadrant. That can imply they are being overly selective with their definitions or there is no market (yet).

I’m briefly looking at the text on the right and they are describing each of the competitors. I’ve not seen someone do that like this before. Frankly, I would just make another slide in a matrix format if they want to share this text.

The deck is only 11 slides so it isn’t terrible that the team is right at the back.

To improve this slide they really need to be adding a few lines to each of the 3 founders. Having a link to LinkedIn is sort of like saying go off and research if you want to know anything about us. In your deck, you only need to make a few points on the team to show that the founders are the right people for the job.

Keep in touch. Bit of a strange thing to write.

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