One founder has ditched long pitch decks and presentations for AI.
“Famously, the Series A was the only time I made a pitch deck,” Aravind Srinivas, the cofounder and CEO of Perplexity, said in an interview with Berkeley Haas released on Saturday.
Perplexity announced its $25.6 million Series A round in March 2023.
Pitch decks are slide shows that give investors and customers key details about a company’s founders, its product, and its financial performance.
“I just write a memo and I tell them you can do a Q&A and ask whatever you want,” Srinivas said, referring to potential investors. “And anything else that is not internal data, you can ask Perplexity. Like, it already knows everything.”
Srinivas cofounded Perplexity in 2022 after working as a researcher at Google’s DeepMind and OpenAI. In August, Business Insider reported that the AI search engine was seeking fresh funding at a $20 billion post-money valuation. The startup has attracted funding from investors including SoftBank, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos.
During Saturday’s interview, the CEO shared how he pitched to investors in the company’s most recent funding round.
He said he hosted a Zoom webinar for one investor who put in a lot of money in this round, and he answered many of their questions on the spot.
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“Then there was a lot of follow-up questions from there that they sent in a long email,” he said. “I copied the entire email, put it into Perplexity, and said: ‘Answer it like Aravind.'”
“So I actually just replied to that email with the Perplexity answer link, and I asked, see if this suffices. If not, I can add more context,” he said. “They said: ‘This is wonderful.’ And they wired the money the next day.”
Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
While there are cases of founders not needing formal presentations because of high inbound investor interest, the no-pitch-deck approach is still rare in Silicon Valley.
In April, workforce management startup Rippling said that it raised a $45 million Series A round, led by Kleiner Perkins, without a formal pitch deck.
“Instead, the centerpiece of our fundraising materials was an Investor Memo, which laid out our pitch in prose,” the company said in a blog post about the raise.
“Accompanying the Memo were 46 slides of metrics, projections, and detailed methodology footnotes; rather than share these as siloed Excel sheets at the diligence stage, we packaged them before the pitch,” Rippling wrote.
