Fundraising

Pitch Deck Teardown: Simba Chain’s $25M Series A deck

Comment

Image Credits: Simba Chain (opens in a new window)

Grab a cup of coffee and strap in, because this pitch deck teardown is pretty different from most of the ones I’ve done to date.

Why? Let me count the ways. (OK, fine, there are only two ways.) But let’s take a closer look:

1. This is a blockchain pitch. The pitch deck is for Simba Chain, a blockchain company that raised $25 million in a Series A. It’s hella brave of them to submit their deck for a teardown. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that of every three or four tweets, one has me making fun of blockchain tech.

It isn’t that I hate the people who build blockchains, but in the decade or so that I’ve been following the industry, I have come across only a tiny handful of companies that make sense to me (Arkive is one, and I did a teardown of its deck, too). Most of the time, I conclude that it’s a crying shame that people this talented are throwing away their time and talent building something in this space.

I know those are harsh words, and I hasten to add that that’s my personal opinion, not that of TechCrunch overall. (Besides, you wouldn’t want me writing about this when we have an incredible crypto/blockchain/web3 team covering it.) I did want to mention it, because as much as I’ll try to be neutral, my disdain for blockchain tech will almost certainly show through in this teardown.

2. TechCrunch didn’t cover the round! I know, I know, that’s pretty much one of the rules here for the pitch deck teardowns. Having said that, The Wall Street Journal covered the round, as did CoinDesk.

Suffice it to say that I’m stretching my knowledge to the max here, but I invite you to consider two things:

  1. I don’t have to have a deep understanding of blockchain tech to be able to critique the pitch. In fact, many of the people who buy my book and who work with me as a pitch coach are running companies in spaces I know nothing about.
  2. Storytelling is universal, and as long as the founders know what they’re talking about, I can help with the pitch side of things.

So here’s an invitation: Let’s see this as an adventure we can go on together, and if you have feedback, thoughts or comments, feel free to write them on a piece of paper and set it on fi … I mean, feel free to make fun of me on Twitter. I promise to be open-minded.

With all of that out of the way, let’s learn some stuff together!


We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that


Slides in this deck

Simba Chain’s slide deck is incredibly impressive and covers a lot of ground. It consists of 19 slides, some of which sneak up on you with a surprise, and others that might leave you scratching your head.

  1. Cover slide
  2. Problem slide
  3. Solution slide
  4. Market slide (TAM/SAM)
  5. Market slide (SOM)
  6. Vision slide
  7. Traction slide
  8. Awards
  9. Team slide
  10.   Board of directors slide
  11.   Scaling Simba slide
  12.   Positioning slide
  13.   Competition slide
  14.   Moat slide
  15.   Competition product comparison slide
  16.   “Invoke Smart Contract Method” slide
  17.   Supported blockchains slide
  18.   Current investors slide
  19.   Thank you/contact slide

Three things to love

There are two ways to make money in a gold rush: One is to dig out a giant honking nugget of heavy, yellow metal; the other is to supply the miners with picks, shovels and TNT.

I love how explicit Simba Chain makes that it is doing the latter — and not just for anyone, either. The company has been working with an incredible list of customers, including ones (such as the U.S. Navy) that are notoriously hard to land contracts with. In the pitch and storytelling, Simba Chain leans on its customers’ pedigree to make its story come to life.

Crystal-clear vision

Simba's Vision slide
[Slide 7] asd Image Credits: Simba Chain

A lot of companies find it surprisingly hard to figure out their raison d’etre. When you’re an early-stage startup running a blue-ocean strategy, a thousand opportunities come your way at every turn. Cutting through the noise with a clear, strategic vision, followed by implementable tactics and repeatable operations, is the way to build a fast-growing, successful company.

This vision slide has an abundance of clarity: “‘Picks and shovels’ of the blockchain rush” is ChefsKiss.gif, and “What Stripe is to payments, Simba will be to blockchain” nails it down harder. I wish that this was the second slide because it gives even a chain skeptic like myself a reason to nod my head and mutter, “I see what you did there,” under my breath.

There’s a couple of head-scratchers here, so I’ll quickly name them: I have no idea what traction or investors are doing on a vision slide — it dilutes the message and muddles the story. If the last two bullets on this slide were moved elsewhere, this would be a perfect setting-the-tone slide for this pitch.

As it is, it’s merely extraordinarily good, so we’ll let the founders off the hook here.

Holy team, Batman!

Simba Chain team slide
[Slide 10] First impression: Goodness, that’s a lot of white guys. Second impression: Goodness, that’s a hell of a team. Image Credits: Simba Chain

In a world where diversity matters, this slide earned an eye-roll from me. But then I started reading the descriptions.

I’ve never seen anything like, “Bryan has been involved in 380 startups and 17 exits” on a slide deck before. It seems like he was pulled in as part of the Series A after serving as the company’s board chairman since its late-2019 seed round. A claim like “380 startups and 17 exits” will have any investor looking up Ritchie’s LinkedIn page.

There seems to be a bit of a disconnect there, and I suspect the founding team had an interesting time in due diligence. Still, the company successfully raised the money, so they passed due diligence, and if the company can back up the claim, it speaks to a lot of experience for sure.

The rest of the team is stacked with veterans, too. The CTO had been in IT academia for a decade before co-founding the company, and the COO spent 25 years at Microsoft before joining Simba Chain (although it appears he’s recently moved on to Google).

The co-founder and ex-CEO, Joel Neidig, has an impressive resume as well, although “addressed the president’s economic council on blockchain” is somewhat fuzzy — I don’t know what that means. In any case, it appears he left Simbla Chain in July, along with COO Joe Matz.

This slide is pretty wild. I haven’t spoken to the company, as I’m trying to do these pitch deck teardowns as prima facie as I can, but there seems to be more to the story than you’d think at first glance.

If I’d come across this deck when the company was raising its round back in 2021, I’d have said, “There’s a lot of veteran talent here.” Looking at it with the benefit of August 2022 eyes, though, the picture is interesting: The CEO wasn’t there when the fundraising happened (he was promoted from board chair to CEO as part of this round), and two of the remaining seven folks on the deck have moved on.

My read is that the company brought in veteran leadership, which caused a shake-up. That’s not a bad thing — companies expanding rapidly often outgrow their founding team and early employees — but it would certainly make me conduct deeper due diligence than usual to make sure there isn’t a cultural problem here.

In any case, the company currently lists 91 employees on LinkedIn, so it looks like it has been on a hell of a trajectory since its early days.

A beast of a competition slide

Competitive Advantage slide
[Slide 17] Image Credits: Simba Chain

Blockchains and web3 are rapidly evolving spaces, both in terms of market acceptance and technology. It helps that Simba Chain was originally spun out of a DARPA contract and has a gathered credibility from being associated with established, well-respected academic organizations. This means it has a head start on making itself palatable for governments and enterprise customers alike.

Of course, the company wasn’t going to add anything to its own competition slide that doesn’t show it coming out on top. Even so, this is a rather impressive way to start a conversation. Follow-up conversations would be around why these points are so important to government customers and how that translates to overall competitive advantages.

Of course, investors will want to check whether Simba truly is way ahead of everyone else and that there is really no competition for no-code options. That said, this slide does something particularly elegant — by mapping out the competitive landscape in this way, you are able to guide the first pass of the competition conversation in your direction. Very clever and undoubtedly elegant.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Simba Chain could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!

Three things that could be improved

I say this every time, and I’ll say it again: $25 million doesn’t lie — the pitch deck worked. This deck has some doozies in it, though, so let’s pick some of them apart:

Where’s your traction?

[Slide 8] Traction Image Credits: Simba Chain

I really don’t want to be rude, but slides 8 and 9 are god-awful. The top right of Slide 8 has a little corner that says, “5,000 users and growing,” and the rest of the slide is a ton of blue-chip logos, along with the words “government, enterprise, supply chain, education.”

The slide (on its own) simply doesn’t make sense, and it’s unclear whether the logos are partners, customers or what have you. If you have 5,000 customers, your traction slide ought to be graphs of number of contracts, number of users, amounts of revenue or any number of other real traction metrics. As it stands, it’s a wall of logos and no story, which made me wary.

awards Image Credits: Simba Chain

It got a lot worse when I got to Slide 9, though; the “awards” listed here are the kind of thing I’d expect from a two-bit early-stage company. “Best new tech in Indiana” is something you put on a slide deck when you are scraping the bottom of the barrel and have literally nothing else.

Suffice it to say that the awards may be worth celebrating internally, but they don’t fulfill the prime directive for a pitch deck: Does this information help an investor make an investing decision?

Put differently, as a general rule, unless you won a Nobel Prize, awards aren’t traction and probably shouldn’t be in your slide deck.

Wait, excuse me, what?

[Slide 16] Four steps is better than 16. Image Credits: Simba Chain

Slides 16 and 17, I think, are meant to illustrate how easy it is to use Simba Chain. On Slide 16, it shows how Alchemy has a 16-step process. Half of it doesn’t make sense to me, but I’ll give the company a break here. It’s complicated.

I’m delighted that Simba’s deployment is a four-step process. Step 3 reads “Create contract in SCD,” and the company lost me. I don’t know what an SCD is. I tried Googling it, but there appear to be a whole bunch of SCDs, so that didn’t really help. In a nutshell, I get that the 16-step process is too many steps, but the four-step one doesn’t look that much easier to me.

The real kicker is that step 4 reads: “Click create app, choose blockchain, name API, click deploy, and approve use of wallet.” I may not understand blockchains or smart contracts, but I can count. Step 4 appears to have five steps in it, which puts a serious dent in the message here.

Zooming out a little from the tactical to the strategic, there are two things to remember: Your investors aren’t necessarily domain experts nor are they your customers. I get what the company is trying to do, and four steps is fewer steps than 16 steps, so that’s encouraging, but you’re still losing me along the way. I almost let this slide, er … slide.

[Slide 17] Wait what? Image Credits: Simba Chain

But then came slide number 17, which is a white-on-black block of text, showing how much easier it is to use Simba than Alchemy. As a non-coder, both of these blocks of text are completely impenetrable. I think the founders are trying to show how much easier it is to use Simba than its competitor, but neither of those look easy to me.

The overarching piece of advice here is this: Remember you are talking to investors. They need to understand the business behind what you are doing. If you are showing command-line screenshots or blocks of JavaScript on your slides, think really hard about why and what purpose it serves.

A better way of telling this story might be visually with a flow diagram that makes the number of steps clear. Or perhaps ask 10 users to figure out how to deploy a contract on Alchemy and Simba, time them and report the time saved.

In any case, I invite you to think about the audience and the message you are trying to convey. If it’s easier, faster, cheaper or better, just say that and save the coding for a live demo. Better still, leave coding to the coders and wave some juicy charts of a bank balance hockey-sticking up and to the right.

Which reminds me…

Where’s the “business” part of this pitch?

Nowhere in the pitch deck is money mentioned. At all. The company doesn’t say what it’s raising. It doesn’t mention business models. It doesn’t show financial projections, operating plans, hiring plans, revenue numbers, growth projections, or, in fact, anything to do with money at all.

This is bizarre. A $25 million Series A is all about growth; showing that you have a functional, repeatable business model that means you’re off to the races. A pitch deck that appears to pretend that money doesn’t exist and doesn’t outline anything about what the company is planning to do with the money, is super weird. I went through the deck a number of times. I even carefully checked the form Simba Chain filled in when it submitted the pitch deck for review — the company noted that the deck is “exactly as used.”

It’s possible that the blockchain world is more alien to me than I care to admit, but I do know startups and storytelling. To raise money, you need to explain how you’re going to spend the money you raise and outline how you’re going to make money at some point.

I’ll be honest: I have no idea how this company raised $25 million without mentioning what its plans are, and that’s the truly impressive thing about this pitch deck. It worked and I haven’t the foggiest idea how.

The full pitch deck


If you want your own pitch deck teardown featured on TC+, here’s more information. Also, check out all our Pitch Deck Teardowns and other pitching advice.

More TechCrunch

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review. This week had two major events from OpenAI and Google. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal of its new model, GPT-4o, which…

OpenAI and Google lay out their competing AI visions

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the travel booking company. In…

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’

When Jeffrey Wang posted to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral.

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying…

Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI moves away from safety

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

2 days ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

2 days ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo