Canvas Pitch Deck Seed Stage Startup to Raise Venture Capital

Here’s the Canvas pitch deck used to raise their $9m series-D from River Cities Capital Funds. Given the fact that it is entitled “The 10 most interesting slides that helped our SaaS company raise $9 million” it’s clearly not the full bob, but you get an idea of their deck. Canvas has raised from some great investors in the past including Union Square Ventures and SV Angel.

Canvas helps you replace your business paperwork with mobile apps and forms to save time and money.

Canvas is a cloud-based software service that allows businesses to replace expensive and inefficient paper forms with powerful apps on their smartphones and tablets. Canvas enables users to easily collect information using mobile devices, share that information and integrate with existing backend systems. Canvas also offers the first business-only application store of its kind, with 13,000+ pre-built, fully customizable apps that work on all mobile platforms and serve 30+ vertical markets.

Every Canvas app is customizable by the end user and can incorporate functionality such as GPS, image capture, dispatch, barcode scanning, electronic signatures, push notifications and access to business data such as parts catalogs, price lists and patient records.

To date, Canvas has automated millions of manual processes and replaced over 30 tons of paper for businesses, making it one of the fastest growing mobile app services in the world.

Deck review

The deck is generally well structured. They apply a fair amount of best practice. Fundamentally it is a little ugly though. It got the job done in any case.

Positive

The deck starts out mapping historic trends of a shift from analog to digital in order to set up the evolution for their business model- one of paper to tablet. This is a useful way to phrase your business too
They reference their statements with sources
The show their traction in the ‘rapid growth and market penetration’ slide. They illustrate some great growth (even if everything is ugly)

Negative

Font size on their problem slide is a little small. There is a lot more space for them to enlarge the text and format better. I don’t find the problem slide terribly compelling or painful
The solution slide “Canvas revolutionizes how work is done’ is a little lame. It’s just a statement with an image of an app. It doesn’t say much
The opportunity slide, or market sizing slide sets out a TAM at between $25-35bn. This is fine per se, but the means by which they account for the addressable market is not. “Any business that collects information” is a bit silly. It would be far better to be more targeted
‘How Canvas works’ is a little confusing. It doesn’t really explain what the product does- rather it seems to explain how the sign up process works
‘Why businesses love canvas’ is good in princple, but there are far too many references and the text is tiny. It’s a very ugly slide