Pitch Deck Teardown: Protecto’s $4M seed platform

In an era where data is king and its volume and complexity are exploding, Protecto aims to eliminate the dilemma businesses have long faced between harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and ensuring data privacy. As the adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT explodes, uncontrollable data becomes easier to find, process, and do bad things. Protecto’s API is designed to protect sensitive data throughout the AI ​​lifecycle while maintaining its usefulness.

The company announced it raised a $4 million seed round led by Together Fund, with participation from Better Capital, FortyTwo VC, Arali Ventures and Speciale Invest. This round brings Protecto’s total funding to $5 million.

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Slides in this deck

Protecto revised its short-term and five-year goals as well as the specifics of its near-term product roadmap before submitting its pitch to TechCrunch. The timeline of goals and milestones associated with the seed round has also been revised. Still, there’s a lot to learn from these 14 slides:

1. coverslip
2. question slides
3. emergency slides
4. Platform interstitial slideshow
5. Technology Overview Slides
6. Results slideshow
7. Solution Slides
8. Case Study Slide 1
9. Case study slide 2
10. Competitive Alternatives Slide
11. Team slides
12. Go to Market Slide
13. Roadmap slideshow
14. Funding Inquiry and Usage Slides

Three things to love about Protecto promotional materials

There is one a lot of While this deck lacks some things, it also has some good things worth highlighting.

Competitive options

This slide does not discuss direct competitors (there are one or two). Regardless, the company does a great job of displaying this information:

[Slide 10] Competing alternatives are a great way to understand the competitive landscape. Image Source: Protect

Competing alternatives are businesses, methods, or approaches that are different from yours but meet the same customer needs or solve the same problems. For example, if you run a coffee shop, a direct competitor would be another coffee shop, while a competing alternative might be a tea shop or a fast food restaurant that also sells coffee and other beverages. These competitors are important because they offer alternative solutions to your customers, highlighting the importance of understanding broader market dynamics and customer preferences.

Understanding and analyzing these competitive alternatives can serve as additional insight, uncover potential differentiation opportunities, and help identify unmet customer needs. Having said that, Protecto should include direct competitors, but this slide is still a good example of how a new startup can explore its market position.

hello team

This team slide is pretty solid – the only downside is that they made it slide 11:

[Slide 11] Rock Solid Team Slides. Image Source:Protect

To stand out in the suddenly crowded field of artificial intelligence, you’d better bring receipts that prove you’re capable of making it happen. There is too much information on the left side of the slide (why are there funds, products, and customers on the team slide?), but there is a lot of important information on the right side.

According to information from LinkedIn, CEO Amar Kanagaraj has worked at Microsoft for nearly eight years, including a period of time working in the fields of search and artificial intelligence. Chief Technology Officer Baskaran Alagasamy has served as a “manager” at Apple India for seven years. I’d love to know more details about his management there (and why this slide says 18 years and his LinkedIn says 7), but this was the start of a truly solid team. If I were investing in this space and a team of this caliber piqued my interest, I would probably schedule a meeting.

elegant solution

Privacy and artificial intelligence can become incredibly complex, fast. I appreciate Protecto’s effort to simplify it to the point where most people can understand what’s going on in technology.

[Slide 5] Obtain sensitive private information. Replace with similar fake data. I feel reasonable. Image Source:Protect

Three things Protecto could improve

The design of a pitch deck is usually not that important, but this one was particularly poorly designed. There are more serious flaws hidden within these pages.

These case studies are not case studies

Out of 14 slides, Protecto wastes slide 4 as an interstitial (it just says “our platform”). Then it wasted two slides titled “Case Study.” However, a more accurate term is “use case”.

[Slide 8] This is not a case study. Image Source:Protect

The full case study will include more information on how successful it was (did the product successfully remove all confidential information? How was it measured?), how long the integration took, and how satisfied the customer was with the solution. Slide 9 is another similar “case study”: a use case, not a case study.

The title of your slide is a promise that the rest of your slide must fulfill. In this case, I was disappointed both times, expecting one message and getting another. A proper case study would be really helpful in telling the story here.

Not a very good “use of funds” slide

There isn’t much here other than abridgements.

[Slide 14] Almost completely irrelevant information. Image Source:Protect

The company plans to raise $3 million. Yet the use of funds is so fluffy; every point here makes me want to ask: “But how do you know it works?”

• Expansion project: Yes, but why, what is the goal, how much is the goal?
• Drive marketing: Yes, but what is the goal? when? How much growth?
• Establish channel sales: Yes, but which channels should you follow first? Why?
• Promote developer evangelism: What’s the point?
• Define categories: ???

Basically, all of these are just enterprise-level terms. Even if the founders buy it themselves, investors may not.

Yes, getting predictable and specific is scary. What if it fails? All plans and forecasts are forecasts. we know. Investors know it. The point is to show how you think about these predictions; investors can learn a lot about you as a founder. This is extremely valuable – and not optional.

This is a brainstorm, not a plan

[Slide 12] This listing is too vague. Image Source:Protect

There are many problems with this slide. The company said it will grow through product-led growth. While this is great, it rarely works alone – it needs to be combined with other marketing channels. In the crowded startup ecosystem, “if you build it, they will come” is not a thing.

I’d like to know what these integrations actually mean and how customers find them. I’d like to understand how Snowflake and Databricks participate in this program. What does it envision as a “solution integrator”?

This slide is a bunch of words on a page, not an actionable, measurable go-to-market plan.

Then everything is missing from the entire deck…

• How big is the market for this kind of thing?
• What has been your attraction so far? Is there any compensation for “case studies”? If so, how much? Do they continue to use the product?
• Nothing about the business model: how will they charge? How many?
• How is this defended? Does the company have a patent? Is there any special magic sauce?

Overall, the problem with this deck is that it doesn’t explain why this problem is difficult to solve and why this company was able to solve it. Maybe it’s an oversimplification of the deck, but just based on what’s here, I think I could round up some developers and build most of this product in a few weeks. This can’t be true, can it? Because if that were the case, there would be nothing here. But since that may not be the case, it means there’s a problem with the storytelling. Yes, this is a big problem; now explain why it is a difficult problem to solve.

Complete promotional materials

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