Most of the The pitch decks we cover in the Pitch Deck Teardown series are for relatively young companies, but to celebrate our 50th pitch deck teardown, I thought I’d do something a little different.
Today, we take a look at the pitch deck of Ageras, which previously raised a $35 million private equity round to further expand its relatively late-stage product portfolio. Given that I’m sitting in Copenhagen, Denmark as I write this, it seems only right to cover a company founded here.
The company raised $73 million from New York-based investment fund Lugard Road Capital in early 2021, and closed its $35 million round about a year ago.
So, what does it do? In the words of its founder:
What started as an online marketplace for small business owners to find accountants in Denmark has now become a financial cockpit used by more than 1 million SMEs across Europe and US, giving them a single, centralized destination for almost all of their needs—bookkeeping, accounting, payroll services, invoicing and now financial services.
I’ll be the first to admit that late-stage decks aren’t my forte, and I know less about private equity than venture capital. But let’s take a look and see what we can learn!
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to break down, so if you’d like to submit your own, here’s how you can do so.
Slides in this deck
With 31 slides, the Ageras deck is a small beast. Some of it was redacted to keep company secrets, er, secret. The general structure is there, however, and we can observe some interesting points in the weaving of a story of a company of 300+ people with a global footprint.
- Cover slide
- Slogan slide
- Overview slide
- Products in general slide part 1
- Product overview slide part 2
- Sliding traction
- Customer slide improvement
- Interstitial slide products
- Product breakdown slide
- Product: market overview slide
- Product: Marketplace “how it works” slide
- Product: Accounting & admin software introduction slide
- Product: Slide on introduction to banking
- Product: Finance introductory slide
- Target customer slide
- Market size slide
- Problem slide (“SMEs struggle to get financing”)
- Slide the solution
- Go to the market slide
- mission slide
- (Redacted) strategic focus area slide
- (Redacted) product roadmap slide
- Get slides
- (Redacted) decline in income growth
- (Redacted) unit economics slide
- (Redacted) profit and loss slide
- (Redacted) balance sheet
- Team slide part 1 (“Meet the founders”)
- Team slide part 2
- (Redacted) organizations slide
- Legal structure overview slide
Three things to love
There’s a lot going on in this deck. Not everything is great (and, as always, we’ll cover that in the second half of this breakdown), but the highlights are brilliant they get:
Comprehensive product portfolio
Ageras has been around for 11 years, starting as a service to match small business owners with accountants, tax professionals and bookkeepers. Then the company started adding related services and grew from there. Obviously, that’s a complicated story to tell, but the team does a really masterful job of providing an overview:
[Slide 9] A good summary of ‘what we do’. Image Credits: Ageras Group
As a mature company with international operations, the product offering varies from country to country according to local compliance rules and laws. The pitch deck breaks down the difference in an easy-to-eat way:
[Slide 12] One of the product overview slides. Image credit: Ageras Group
Smart use of data
As Ageras gains access to more financial data and connects its customers with professionals, something interesting emerges from that synthesis: It knows more about its customers’ financial health than almost even who.
As such, it is known that it can offer financial services (for example, small business loans) with less risk than a bank that does not have the same amount of daily assets. well:
[Slide 17] Excellent storytelling around the problem statement. Image credit: Ageras Group
In fact, Ageras uses its data so that it can provide more loans to what it calls ‘medium-risk’ businesses.
This slide taught us that it is a good idea to always be on the lookout for adjacent services that can grow from a solid business. When Ageras only matched companies to accountants, this would not have been possible. But as its customer base and the amount of available data increases, so do opportunities.
Some late stage flexing
I wanted to share a couple of slides from this deck because I don’t often see such materials in the earlier stage of the pitch deck and it intrigued me.
As the complexity increases, it makes sense that the company needs an international structure to support its operations in different countries:
[Slide 31] Corporations that own corporations that own corporations. Image Credits: Ageras Group.
Ageras has grown into new markets and verticals by acquiring companies. The slide itself, in my opinion, has some major flaws (we’ll explore those later), but its presence in the deck is a welcome change for a late-stage company:
[Slide 23] Progress through acquisition. Image credit: Ageras Group.
The company redacted the data from slide 19, but you can learn more from it: Customer acquisition costs continue to matter, and if you can report it as a trailing average graph, you’re telling the investors you know it’s important, you. It is monitored, and you are actively working to improve it.
[Slide 19] CAC over time. Yessssssss. Image credit: Ageras Group.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things that Ageras could have improved or done differently, along with its entire pitch deck!
