This is the Cloudian pitch deck to raise their $94m series-E.
About Cloudian
Cloudian turns information into insight with an infinitely scalable platform that consolidates, manages and protects enterprise data. Cloudian Enterprise Object Storage brings cloud technology and economics to the data centre with uncompromising data durability, intuitive management tools and the industry’s most compatible S3 API. Cloudian and its ecosystem partners help Global 1000 customers simplify unstructured data management today while preparing for the data demands of AI and machine learning tomorrow.
When Michael Tso started Cloudian in 2011, those sceptical of his business model were telling him that public clouds — like the market-leading Amazon Web Services — were going to take over the entire storage market.
Tso’s hypothesis, however, was that the future “wouldn’t be as simple as a one-size-fits-all approach” when it came to enterprise storage, he told Business Insider in a recent interview.
Instead, Cloudian focused on building a storage product with similar upsides to the cloud, like lower costs and easier management, that could be housed in a company’s own data centres and server rooms. That’s important for companies that can’t or won’t move to the cloud, such as those in highly regulated industries like finance or healthcare.
“Where you don’t want to put your data into the cloud, we bring the cloud to you,” Tso said.
The approach has paid off. Tso said that today there’s a growing acceptance that data storage for enterprise companies will be “something like a 50-50 split” between what stays in a company’s own servers versus what goes into the public cloud.
Investors seem to agree. Last August, Cloudian, in San Mateo, California, raised a $94 million Series E round led by Digital Alpha Advisors, with participation from other firms, including Goldman Sachs. Cloudian has raised over $173 million in total.
As for advice on what makes for a successful pitch to venture capitalists, Tso told us that in later rounds, like Series E, investors are less interested in big ideas and more focused on the actual numbers.
VCs “don’t just want to see the good stuff,” as in the bigger-picture vision, he said, but also a “key set of metrics that will give them hope that the business is growing in the right direction.”
The other piece of the puzzle: “The most important thing in all this is to have happy customers,” he said. That’s why in every investor deck he includes a slide showing the percentage of customers who said they would recommend Cloudian to others. For Cloudian, it’s 94%.
Source: CrunchBase and Business Insider
Funding Rounds
Structured Summary Review
Words
A lot of the slides are very compressed. There’s not much room for more words, but they need more to explain things as far as I am concerned.
Slide length
There are ten slides in the deck shared. Not sure how many are missing but my guess is not too many. They should have spread out the content on more slides.
Headers
The slides are better than writing “problem” but they don’t explain very much.
Appearance
The design is adequate. They don’t need to do that much more.
Narrative
You need proper headers to tell a narrative. I think the slides are in the right order broadly speaking.
Structure
The slides can be very busy. I would restructure the slides to make them easier to understand.
Slides
They are a later-stage company. The goal is to get lots of money because they have figured things out. As a deck to get meetings and the conversation going, the deck is fine. There are a lot more details that growth investors will ask of them later in the process.
Cloudian Pitch Deck
The cover is solid, but the design is a bit iffy. I wouldn’t obsess about your cover too much. You need to know what to focus on.
Start out with what you do. Explain in max three lines.
I always start with the industry as it sets the scene. Do the same, it’s an easy win.
Go easy with superlative adjectives such as “enormous”. They make eyes roll.
The slide structure is very good. I would design it a little differently but the elements are there.
Hang on they say “particularly unstructured data”. I know a tad about “AI” and unstructured data is a thing. If it is a thing to them they need a slide or two to explain it.
The body header and description text should be a different size.
What? I have no idea what is going on here. If you dump an image like this then the header needs to be obvious.
I would have the source on one line. Minor but it helps keep the slide cleaner.
The pie chart numbers could be more directly linked to the text on the right. It looks like there are comments on the numbers in the blue box.
They say that enterprise users require multi-cloud but they haven’t proven that.
The market sizing isn’t terrible. I don’t get the capacity growth of 50%. Clearly, $19b TAM sounds good, but is that really what they can serve?
They are doing a series E so I presume the team are known. It’s ok that the slide isn’t how I typically like it. I think they are just ticking the box. For earlier stage companies I would want the team to be far more prominent.
The partners and investors are sort of social proof signals, and I’m not sure if that’s necessary.
There’s a lot going on this slide. The “where we fit” box could be a slide in itself, as could the matrix.
The title isn’t descriptive, I have to read the whole slide to get the point.
What does one first impression mean? Not messing up? Weird thing to say. Looks like land and expansion is important to them.
They whacked in a statement in the footer. I almost didn’t notice that.
This slide can be interesting to investors. Some enterprise clients, won’t even look at a startup if they aren’t in Gartner and 2 other firms’ research coverage.
Doesn’t “one in a generation” make your eyes roll? This is an interesting summary slide to end your deck with though.
Deck Collection
See the rest of the collection here:
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