What a Biotech Pitch Deck Needs

Anthony Chow is a co-founder of Agronomics, a London-listed investment company that backs cellular agriculture and precision fermentation. In our interview with him, published in June 2024, he described the point where a biotech claim gets priced. Agronomics agrees commercial terms first and then sends the company to “a panel of experts that we call upon depending on the nature of the company we're doing a deep dive on.” If the experts’ findings do not support the terms, “then they would need to be tweaked.” He is describing his own fund's process. Across our 16 investor interviews, several other funds described agreeing terms before deep technical diligence. Where that is the order, the claims a founder makes in the meeting are priced into the deal before specialists test them, and a claim stated above its evidence can come back as a renegotiation.

The deck order starts with the buyer’s problem

Aspyre Foods grows duckweed to produce functional proteins for food producers, starting with casein and Rubisco. We wrote Aspyre’s investor deck as a 32-page document in five parts, and our Aspyre case study records its order. It moves from why producers are exposed and why supply is fragile to why duckweed, then to two proteins with two entry markets, and closes on proof, team and the ask.

That order serves the technical reader as well as the generalist. The organism arrives third, after the deck has stated the problem it answers, so an expert reads duckweed as a proposed solution to a defined supply problem and can test it against that problem. Each protein is tied to its own entry market, which gives every technical claim a commercial consequence the panel can check. Proof comes after the reader knows what the proof has to establish. A deck that opens on the platform asks the expert to evaluate the mechanism before knowing what it is for. The same move ran through Unibio’s repositioning. Unibio makes protein for animal feed by gas fermentation, and in its story the product now leads and the process explains why it can be made differently.

Claims are written at the level the evidence supports

Words such as proven, validated, scalable, commercial and ready carry different meanings depending on what has been demonstrated, and a specialist reads each one as a claim to test. The team building the deck should ask for the source behind every consequential claim and narrow any wording that runs ahead of the data. Ambition can stay in the case while the boundary of the evidence stays visible. Our guide to technical evidence and impact claims goes further into that discipline.

Charts need the same care. A figure redrawn for style can lose the axes, units, sample sizes, time frames, controls and test conditions that made the original result interpretable. The workflow that survives diligence starts from the underlying figure or data, redraws only what needs redrawing and checks the finished slide against the source. Early results stay labelled as early results.

Regulation and scale belong in the main case

For food tech, industrial biotech and other regulated businesses, the approval route and the route to commercial scale shape capital, timing and customer readiness. Left in the appendix, either one makes the core case look more mature than the operating plan supports. The deck should show which approvals apply to the product and market in question, what the team has completed and which steps remain. The scale-up section connects current output to the next operating milestone, the economics that change with it and the evidence the new capital is meant to create. The biomanufacturing scale-up guide covers that transition in more depth.

The round buys a change in the evidence

A science-led raise is easier to price when the use of capital is written as a change in the evidence position. The deck states what the company can demonstrate today, which uncertainty blocks the next commercial or financing decision, and what the funded milestone is expected to establish. A validation study, a regulatory submission, a pilot run, an engineering package and a first commercial deployment each retire a different uncertainty, and the deck should say which one matters next.

The status of each result has to hold across every document the panel sees. A pilot described as commercial proof in the deck and as early validation in the data room creates a diligence problem no design can repair. We wrote Aspyre’s full deck first and cut the teaser from it, so every claim in the short version traces back to the long one. A shared evidence register does the same job across deck, website and data room, keeping each claim’s source, status and limitation fixed while the depth changes for the reader. We will not present a result in a deck at a stronger status than the data room gives it.

When a deck is built that way, the panel’s work confirms the terms the partner offered. The expert finds what the deck said, at the status the deck gave it, and the cheapest outcome of technical diligence for a founder is a set of terms that does not have to move.

Sources and further reading

• Anthony Chow, Agronomics, investor interview
• Aspyre case study
• What 16 Investor Interviews Teach Founders About the Decision After the Pitch
• How to Turn Technical Evidence Into an Impact Story Without Overclaiming
• What Is Industrial Biotechnology? From the First Product to the First Plant
• How Deep Tech Brand and Pitch Work Is Scoped
• Biotech branding and pitch work
• Pitch storytelling and deck design