Curve Pitch Deck to Raise a $55m Series B

Curve Pitch Deck to Raise a $55m Series B

This is the Curve Pitch Deck used to raise a total of $55M. This raise was announced on Jul 15, 2019.

pitch deck

About

Curve is an over-the-top banking platform, consolidating all your cards and accounts into one smart card and even smarter app. It allows customers to supercharge their legacy banks to the 21st century without leaving their bank or topping-up. Curve offers a host of benefits to its customers; it makes all your cards fee-free when spending abroad, you get instant notifications and categorisation of spend, you can earn instant 1% cashback at the likes of Amazon, Uber, Netflix and Sainsbury’s and Time Travel enables customers to swap spend to a different card in the app for up to two weeks after the purchase was made. Curve also offers Curve Customer Protection, a policy that covers all credit and debit card payments made via the Curve card up to £100,000, giving cardholders an extra layer of protection for disputes with merchants and any unauthorised use of their Curve card. Whether you have a Curve Metal card, Curve Black card or Curve Blue card, Curve Customer Protection offers you a better level of protection in many ways – filling in the gaps that Section 75 leaves.

Funnily enough, the founder asked me to advise him years ago.

Shachar Bialick, Anna Mostyn Williams, and Tom Foster-Carter established the company in London, England in 2015.

London’s fintech scene is potentially the hottest on the planet right now with startups covering every possible area popping up regularly with record amounts invested in UK tech so far this year.

It’s coincided with moment of greater access to capital for many of the UK’s most promising young companies with valuations and funding round sizes regularly gaining in stature. That’s the case for Curve, a fintech that provides a platform to merge all of your bank cards into one service.

The company aims to “rebundle” financial services and move banking onto the cloud — saying it’s trying to streamline fragmented services with a single point of access, better leverage data add value. In short, it wants to become what it calls “the Spotify for money.” The company is estimated to be valued at about $202 million.

Earlier this year, Curve secured a $55 million Series B from investors including: Speedinvest, Seedcamp, Santander InnoVentures, Outward VC, IDC Ventures, Gauss Ventures, CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund, and Breega Capital.

“The Series B fundraising was a major milestone for Curve from many perspectives,” Shachar Bialick, Curve’s CEO and founder, told Business Insider in an interview. “It’s rare to see Series B of this size in the market, and it is indeed pretty unique to the fintech vertical we’re in, predominantly due to the size of the opportunity and the success metrics we’re hitting.”

“The latest round of funding is helping us to continue and expand our product offering and markets and reach out to new customers with new solutions every day”.

The company‘s pitch deck raised $55 million and recently used an amended version of its pitch deck as part of rapid £6 million ($7.5 million) crowdfunding — taking its total funding to $74.2 million.

“Investors want to understand how Curve differs as a product from existing products in the market, and why this positioning is better than what exists in the market,” Bialick added. “To that extent, it is also important to show a good handle of unit economics and strong product and growth metrics.”

Raises

Announced Date
Transaction Name Number of Investors Money Raised Lead Investors
May 25, 2021 Equity Crowdfunding – Curve 1 £9.4M
Jan 12, 2021 Series C – Curve 4 $95M
Fuel Venture Capital, IDC Ventures, Vulcan Capital
Sep 3, 2019 Equity Crowdfunding – Curve 1 £6M Crowdcube
Jul 15, 2019 Series B – Curve 10 $55M
Gauss Ventures
Jul 11, 2017 Series A – Curve 16 $10M
Breega, Connect Ventures
Dec 10, 2015 Seed Round – Curve 6 $2M

Structured summary review

Words

They can be a bit of a chatty cathy, but iun a negative way. There is borderline the right amount of text, but they allocate their words poorly.

Slide length

Maybe slightly short. I don’t feel there is enough to make me go “yeah, this makes sense!”

Headers

Shocking. They are your best friend to tell a story. Never write mission etc. That is a checklist.

Appearance

I don’t like decks done by designers. They mask content inadequacy.

It sort of looks good, but it cock blocks the content.

Narrative

There isn’t a narrative as the headers aren’t used.

The slides are sort of in the right order. Sort of.

Structure

Slides look like someone worked a bit in banking but forgot most of the learnings.

Compared to some people, the structure is what they would dream to do, but I am comparing it against ideal.

If you’re a bit of a moron at PPT then there is a lot to learn here, but there is a lot to not do at the master level.

Slides

Like the gypsy said- stop with the fancy stuff and stick it in. They sort of cover everything they need to, but don’t really get specific.

What is their actual market size? How much money could they make? I have no idea.

Slide by slide review

Don’t put the date on your slide because investors will know when you sent them the deck and how long you have been fundraising for.

Overall the slide quality is very good.

This is an absolutely terrible slide. Does this tell you anything whatsoever?

In general, I do not ever include a mission slide because they are always full of corporate jargon the bullshite but for a startup.

 

The headers in this pitch deck are absolutely terrible in the worst possible way to structure your pitch deck. Do not under any circumstances ever write problem, solution, business model, market size in your header. That is a checklist and you forgot to fill in the template!

This is the prototypical example of a shite and very lazy start top slide where you just make 3 bullet points. It is fantastic that there are three points but look at it. It is terrible. Can’t you state the core point and then explain it in more detail?

 

 

 

Do not write a paragraph. Ever. You are allowed structured bullet points.

They could have explained this in half the words.  to be specific there are six different aggregations that they want to have it would be interesting if they remove the stupid phone and stuck in examples of the companies that they want to partner with.

Do not think that’s a stupid pretty photo is more informative than actually interesting information.

I spent a lot of time researching timing for startups and what I realized is the timing is almost never now, so don’t attempt to say that.  The most that startups can hope for is that the trends are in the right direction or there is starting to be an obvious inflection point. The only instances where the timing is now is due to a regulation change or something messed up like covid f****** up all our lives.

Look at the size of the fonts under the 3 points. The numbers are absolutely massive but what is the point of the numbers without understanding what they are? Use large fonts that are legible.

I like that that are specific examples for once as you can see with the little logos. That is a good example of being specific in an elegant manner.

No it is not a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This stuff makes my eyes roll.

This is potentially a very smart slide as they are told King about having the right Focus but the founder is too smart and has not explained the data set.

Investors need to be able to understand something in 5 seconds.

 I love his use of numbers but he’s making it too difficult to be able to comprehend this quickly. This is almost a perfect slide to nerdy me. 

Stop with all the writing, look how much text there is at the bottom. 

The iPhone takes up too much space and you can actually see what is happening there. It would better to have one specific example or to zoom in on to the specific aspects.

Do not put an image in the header as a replacement for a word. Be boring and consistent.

The title is far too long and it is very indulgent.

Everything on this slide is absolutely terribly small.

The slide was not thought through at all. It is like they started working on something fancy and then got confused and lost.

That is far too much going on the slide. Where do you even start? Your eye will be immediately be drawn to the person in the center and then you will be lost.

There seems to be some mess up visually in the top right corner. 

The images need to be compressed and pulled down to make space for the new subheader.

I feel like the founder is trying to be far too smart and visionary here and I don’t see how it links to their business. This is an example of drinking the Kool-Aid of your own startup.

This is an example of a slide that might make sense if the founder is explaining it but it is far too obtuse looking at it. 

If this was really central, I would put it on three slides. Something has to be critical to warrant 3 slides though.

Smart stuff but impossible to read. Why is the font so small. Not quite sure the content is all useful though. What’s the point of the slide?

This is late for the team slide. Always use bullet points. I normally only want 3 people on the team slide. Do you really need everyone? Include those that investors want to meet. You can provide more information after.

If investors are really interested, then this isn’t a terrible format for a later-stage company. There are no rules with pitch decks, just bad things to do. I change my mind all the time.

This is a fine slide for a later-stage company, but it says nothing. It’s a social proof slide, sort of.

I just care about how much you have raised, and maybe how much the founders own.

If you are early stage, you have to do this stuff because you have nothing. If you are later stage then I want charts.

Is this how they make money? Why is it subscriptions?

It’s not a terrible slide. I care about font size a lot because that is about reading quickly.

This is 100% an appendix slide. You shouldn’t have appendix slides in the deck you send. You have them in a reading deck for later.

 

Need help with your deck?

Head over to Perfect Pitch Deck. Competitive pricing and expert assistance to get you fundraise ready and confident.

Want to see the 100 other pitch decks?

If you love pitch decks, check out the ultimate pitch deck collection here!

    Get in the game

    Free tools and resources like this shipped to you as they happen.

    Please include an ‘@’ in the email address.
    Example of valid email: [email protected]

    Comments (0)

    There are no comments yet :(

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    Leave a Reply

      Join Our Newsletter

      Get new posts delivered to your inbox

      www.alexanderjarvis.com