Cleo Series-B Pitch Deck

This is the Cleo pitch deck to raise their $44m series-B in 2020.

About Cleo

Cleo is a digital financial assistant that helps users manage their personal finances through a conversational chat interface. It connects with users’ bank accounts to track spending, monitor budgeting, and offer insights into saving opportunities. By using data-driven insights, Cleo makes financial information more accessible and easier to understand, simplifying the everyday process of money management.

About sharing the Cleo deck

Barney Hussey-Yeo wrote on Twitter (No, I’m not calling it X) “A founder asked me yesterday to share the decks I used to raise for inspiration. So, I figured I might as well post them publicly.”

Barney shared the decks for 4 rounds (All are available for you to see here):

• Seed
• Series-A
• Series-B
• Series-C

I’m going to repeat this content for each of the 4 blogs.

Angel

Created for demo day at Entrepreneur First in 2016, only a few months into starting the company.

This first round was “pretty easy” to raise but was only £600k, which was pretty normal for a pre-seed/seed in London at the time (crazy, I know).

I remember getting my first term sheet for £300k from @alexdunsdon at Saatchi & Saatchi before demo day, which took the pressure off.

The advice from EF and Alex back then was to be the most un-European, ambitious version of myself in pitch meetings. I made sure everyone I met knew I was going to “build a Google sized” company and that AI agents would change computing forever.

I’m sure anyone I met at the time thought I was absolutely nuts and probably the most obnoxious 25-year-old on the planet. But that advice is still solid—if you’re raising, follow it. Passion, energy, and ambition are infectious.

The product was hacked together, running on SMS only at the time. You could sign up, link your bank via Saltedge (an EU Plaid competitor), then ask questions via SMS. The NLP was incredibly rudimentary: basically fuzzy matching of strings to predefined intents, with no entity extraction.

People mostly used it to get their balance across accounts. You could just say “balance,” which was faster than logging into your online bank back then.

I distinctly remember heading to pitch @nzennstrom and discovering in the taxi on the way to Mayfair that Cleo wasn’t responding. So, before going into the office, I sat on the curb with my laptop, debugging the issue and pushing a fix to prod.

Bug fixed, bag secured.

Seed

We raised a £2m Seed round from @localglobevc next, and brought in some exceptional angels. But there was no deck for this round.

@robinklein, @cape, and @tarareeves made it very easy: no deck, no partner presentation, and just leaning in with a convertible loan note.

Looking back, this is why they’ve consistently dominated Seed investing in Europe:

1. Build conviction in a space early.
2. Find the team/founder you think will win (we had a ton of copycat cos they could have invested in at the time—most are no longer running).
3. Lean in early and make it easy for the founder.

Series-A

Series A was another pre-emption, this time from @balderton and @robmoff.

Rob invited us to pitch at the regular Monday partner meeting the Friday before, so the deck was a fun weekend project:

The feedback after the pitch meeting was that we got all “yes” votes except for one holdout: a certain @jamespaulwise, who dubbed it a “bombastic, over-enthused EF pitch.” Given the number of Red Bulls I’d necked before, that was probably spot on.

Series-B

Series B was hands down the hardest round I ever raised.

Going in, I felt pretty confident. We were growing rapidly, had just started building the business model, and the U.S. market was really taking off.

After a few weeks of raising, talk about a virus leaking from Wuhan, China, started picking up. “Excess” became a common narrative in venture post Uber/WeWork collapse. Conversations shifted from “tell me about your WAUs and growth plans” to “tell me about your unit economics and payback period.” (We had a three-year payback at the time ?)

VCs began pulling back, and pitch meetings suddenly spent 10 minutes on COVID. Thankfully, @eqtventures, @tomasmendoza, and @HjalmarWinbladh had absolute conviction in Cleo as an AI agent. They cared far more about becoming the relationship a billion people had with their money than about six months of UE data the other growth funds focused on.

We ended up raising £25m from EQT. They could have easily pulled the term sheet as the world went into lockdown and the S&P 500 tanked. A lot of VCs did exactly that back then, and it proved the old adage: you find out who people really are in hard times.

Series-C

Series C: We raised $80m in 2022, in the post-stimulus world and just before Russia invaded Ukraine.

This was a fairly straightforward process. We had a couple of offers and chose Sofina because the deal was the most competitive (22x ARR), and I got on well with @AnthonyKeusters . We’d spend half our time chatting about cycling (natural for a Belgian).

The best thing about partnering with Sofina was that they genuinely bought into the mission of redefining the world’s relationship with money. It’s refreshing to have a VC on the board with a very long time horizon and a true mission focus—very different from most growth investors.

This was before the LLM hype, back when people weren’t yet convinced AI agents were going to be a big deal, but the market was still buoyant, and FinTech was in fashion.

The main feedback we got from this round was on margins and unit economics. At the time, our contribution margin was ~28% and our payback period was between 1 and 2 years. We’d made good progress since Series B but still had work to do in diversifying the business model and launching new products.

Today, we’re at a 60%+ contribution margin and a payback period of under 6 months.

Comment

For founders reading: I don’t think these are the best pitch decks in the world, but they have a consistent vision of building an AI agent that makes money work for normal people. It’s (a) a big vision with societal impact and (b) clear enough for anyone to understand at a high level.

If you’re ever pitching a VC, remember they’re looking for power-law outlier companies—ones that can return the fund several times over. So be truly ambitious about the scale of impact you want to see in 10 years.

Err on the side of boldness and ambition.

Funding Rounds

Pitch deck

Deck Collection

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