Berlin-based start-up Pitch has received $19m in funding from the likes of Slack in its latest round of investment and plans to use it to make presenting easier in workplaces
Ponderous PowerPoint presentations have been a mainstay of offices since the 1980s – but with a $19m (£15m) funding round now secured, Pitch is aiming to make presenting easier.
The Berlin-based tech start-up has netted investment from venture capital firms Index Ventures and BlueYard, as well as workflow management platform Slack.
It plans to use modern web technologies, data integrations and team-orientated features to enable greater collaboration in the presentation process, while making it quicker and easier for slides to be shared with an audience.
Pitch CEO and founder Christian Reber said: “This is a transformational time for business software, where innovation and thoughtful design is resetting expectations and reimagining the user experience.
“Yet presentation tools have not kept pace with technology and feel unnecessarily complex and difficult to use. There needs to be something new, different and substantially better.
“Pitch is a new beginning. We set out to rethink how individuals and teams express ideas, collaborate and communicate progress, and support their decision-making with well understood data.
“The result is an ambitious vision to build an open platform and radically improve the way presentations are crafted and knowledge is shared. A new paradigm, designed for everyone, made for teams.”
Pitch could make presenting easier – but how long has it been going?
Pitch was started in January 2018 by the founding team behind Wunderlist – the leading to-do app acquired by Microsoft in 2015.
This latest round of investment brings its total funding up to $22m (£17m), and will be used to grow the design, engineering and marketing teams, as well as to help bring the product to market and make presenting easier.
Other key contributors to the round include a raft of CEOs, including Eric Yuan of enterprise video firm Zoom and Koen Bok of interactive design platform Framer.
Neil Rimer, partner at Index Ventures and who now joins the Pitch board, said: “Pitch is one of Europe’s few true product-centric companies breaking new ground in software for businesses.
“From messaging to file sharing, software companies like Slack and Dropbox have transformed how teams work together and unlocked greater productivity as a result.
“We believe Pitch has the potential to redefine the presentation space and become a central hub for content collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and ultimately a platform for better decision-making.”