This is the Apteo pitch deck to raise a $1.1m seed round in 2019. It’s a good deck and totally worth checking out.
About
Apteo enables eCommerce and SaaS marketing, sales, and customer success teams to grow and retain customers through predictive user behaviour. With Apteo you can understand which customers are most likely to churn and how best to re-engage them. Simply connect your data in minutes and get pre-built reports to help you score and segment every customer based on the likelihood of churn, surface key drivers of churn, proactively reach out to customers to re-engage, retain top performers, identify up-sell opportunities, and share reports with your entire team.
Wall Street’s interest in nontraditional data sets is surging, but firms also still rely heavily on more conventional types of data, and that has created a need for a bridge between the two types of information.
That’s the pitch behind Shanif Dhanani and Manan Shah’s startup, Apteo, which aims to serve as a central hub for data, be it traditional or alternative, public or proprietary. By cataloguing information in a central repository, Apteo is looking to help firms better make connections between various data sources.
Dhanani, Apteo’s chief executive, told Business Insider the growth of alternative data, which can include things like satellite images or credit card transactions, had proved tricky for some investors to integrate with the data sets they’d always used.
“There’s a ton of data now that sits outside of the traditional terminal, like a Bloomberg or FactSet, and folks really see the value in this,” he said. “But they’re having trouble finding out where it lives. They’re having trouble managing it within their firm. They’re having trouble analyzing it so that they can get business use out of it.”
Alternative data has exploded onto the scene in recent years. The world once occupied by only the most extreme, quantitative hedge funds has now expanded, with more and more investors looking to use alt data in their investment strategies.
But it’s not a zero-sum game. The market data that has long been a staple of Wall Street is still as popular, and needed, as ever.
The industry is beginning to reach a tipping point, Dhanani and Shah said, as investors need to figure out how to meld the two sides.
That’s especially tricky for alternative data, Shah said, as the consumption and use haven’t fully matured.
“The way it’s being managed today, candidly, is through janky Excel spreadsheets on people’s desktop transferring files via Microsoft Outlook,” said Shah, who serves as the firm’s chief operating officer. “So we think there’s an opportunity to create this sort of software solution to help these customers manage these different data sets, subscriptions, and data sources in a systematic way.”
In January, Apteo was accepted into the New York-based Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, which included a $100,000 investment.
In October, the startup closed its seed round, bringing on institutional money for the first time. The Toronto-based Ripple Ventures led the $1 million seed round. Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator also joined the round, in addition to the new investors Gavin Ezekowitz, a managing partner for the multi-family office Belz Family and Associates, and the venture-capital firms KPB Capital and CFV Ventures.
In the near term, Shah said, the company will focus on two types of customers who can be found across banks and asset managers.
One use case is those who may not have experience in machine-learning or artificial-intelligence techniques but are interested in applying them to data. The other is for people overseeing a multitude of data subscriptions across a firm.
Shah said Apteo could help both do their jobs more efficiently.
“We think that’s a massive jump in productivity for the person that manages all things data and also the end user that’s going out and searching for that data,” Shah said.
Funding Rounds
| Announced Date | Transaction Name | Number of Investors | Money Raised | Lead Investors |
| Nov 18, 2019 | Pre Seed Round – Apteo | 4 | $1M | Ripple Ventures |
| Jan 7, 2019 | Funding Round – Apteo | 1 | $100K | — |
Pitch Deck Review Summary
Structured Summary Review
Words
Good use of words. The length is typically very strong.
Slide length
The deck is 12 slides and for a cheeky million dollar raise is very solid. Sure they could have some more slides, but it’s solid.
Headers
They do the headers well and better than pretty much any deck i can think of late.
Appearance
It’s basic, just the way that I like it. Goes to show that you don’t need to make some fancy pants deck or get a designer.
Narrative
They use their headers very well so there is a narrative.
Structure
The slides are all structured well (almost all).
Slides
They sort of cover everything that they need to. There are topics that I would like them to cover, but I can also see the stage they are at and reasonably assume they will figure it out later with more time and another raise.
Slide by Slide Review
Solid cover.
You don’t need the email and website on the cover.
Love the slide format. This is more similar to how I structure a slide.
The header font size is a little large.
Three is always good (Read: Rule of three). Like the header and description.
The body copy is a little too long though. They need to be a little more brutal with culling words.
I don’t like adding “the problem” etc at the top of each slide. Also just noticed this too. Use sentence case, not the thingy which capitalises each word.
Three as usual is good. Actually, the whole body of content is my go-to structure when I’m not sure what to make. You can’t really go wrong with this. Yeah, it looks
They actually write the content fairly well in so far as they get to the point and it’s simple to understand.
Ok, the slide is basic but it’s actually solid.
The text at the bottom is tiny.
Again, simple slide I like it. I do wonder if details are missing in their simple flow?
Competition slides can be a bit tricky to do right. What you’re ultimately trying to do is show investors how you are differentiated. What ends up happening is that founders just resort to showing features, and the ones that they choose!
Ever wonder what a competitor would say if they saw your competition slide? Well, pretend and you can improve your competition slide.
As you can see, unsurprisingly, Apteo has picked a bunch of features and there are only green ticks.
What they should do is remove the competitive landscape text, make the header smaller, and then put the text at the bottom of the slide as the sub-header.
This is the first time they’ve made a slide boo boo. Don’t make a wall of text.
Hmm, for market sizing this is a crappy slide. It’s sort of the lazies version of top-down. You want to take numbers and then apply some critical thinking and share your thoughts. Your numbers will be wrong, but that’s not the point. It’s how you so your thinking that investors want to see (so long as the market is large enough, that is).
Look at the slide, it’s really simple but it makes the point. I highly recommend making simple slides like this if you are stuck.
For a revenue slide, this is good, and it’s similar to how I make the revenue slide.
The bubbles are too large. They could add $ numbers for the monthly fee and premium data.
They have done the team slide really well. The only thing i dislike they are doing is adding tiny text at the bottom which is actually interesting information. If something is on a slide it has to be worth reading and it has to be legible.
How much are they raising? That should be on the slide, but it’s a public deck so I never am sure what they have chosen not to share.
The content on the slide is fine and it seems like they have a plan. The hiring of a head of sales bit does raise a question mark since I wonder if they have figured out how to do sales yet. I’m not going to bang on and explain this now.
I don’t like ending a deck like this. I do it differently.
Deck Collection
See the rest of the collection here:
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