What an Investor Deck Actually Has to Make Easy to Decide

David Garrison was building two things at once. Climate & Capital began as a media company, and Climate & Capital Connect grew out of it as a networking platform for climate action. When the company set out to raise, the team changed how it talked about the media side and the network side together and took one pitch to investors. In his Brighter Future interview, published in July 2022, he looked back on that pitch. “I still like where we ended up with the pitch, but I can accept that it was confusing for investors.” Then he named the reason it could not close. “Ultimately, the media investors didn’t want to invest in a tech company, and the tech investors didn’t want to invest in a media company.”

Those two sentences describe two different problems, and only the first one concerns the deck. A deck has a narrower job than founders often give it. It makes a viable investment decision easier to understand, test and carry forward, and a fund’s mandate sits outside its reach. The last pass is the most recent investor's decision not to invest. The first task in any deck review is to work out which kind of problem it came from.

A pass has to be read before the slides change

The Belief Diagnosis reads a stalled decision in four states, and calls the point where a decision stops moving a break. Evidence asks whether the claims are supported. Clarity asks whether the reader can understand what the company is and how it works. Conviction asks whether the reader believes the proposition applies to this opportunity. Commitment asks whether the fund can act, given its mandate, ownership needs, timing and the judgement of the people around the decision.

Garrison’s account sits across two of them. The confusion he accepts is a clarity break, because investors met two businesses in one pitch and had to work out which one they were being asked to back. Under it sits a commitment break. Each investor he describes had a mandate for one of the two businesses, so a clearer combined pitch would still have asked every fund to buy something outside its remit. Repairing the clarity break alone would have produced a better presentation of the same mismatch.

The company dealt with the structural problem first. “We ended up pulling back and changing the objective, opting for a slower growth model that was more organic,” Garrison said. He did not rebuild the deck and go back out with it. This is one founder’s recollection of his own raise, and we have no record of what the investors said on their side. It still shows the order of the work clearly. The structural question was answered first, and the presentation question became smaller once it was.

The same investor response can come from different places. “Come back with more traction” can mean the investor needs customer evidence. It can also be a courteous close from a fund that was never going to write the cheque. Brighter Future will not rebuild a deck before we know whether the pass came from the deck at all. We reconstruct the last few investor conversations, find the point where the questions changed or stopped, and decide whether the material is implicated before anyone opens the slides.

Treating every pass as a request for a new slide makes the deck worse while it looks more complete. One investor asks about margins and the deck gains a margin slide. Another asks about regulation, so regulation moves forward. After ten conversations the deck holds ten local repairs and no account of why anyone passed. Some passes turn on a single gate the slides cannot move. Nick Lyth, founder of the UK angel syndicate Green Angel Ventures, described its entry test when we interviewed him in May 2024. “Our unique criterion is the ability to reduce carbon emissions.” He added that “if you don't meet that criterion, you're out.” That is one syndicate’s rule, and other investors we interviewed described their own gates on stage, cheque size and mandate. Reconstructing the passes separates presentation feedback from decision constraints like these.

Slide titles carry the investment case

Category titles make a reader do translation the deck should have done. “Technology” tells the reader what kind of slide they are looking at. “Our process removes the energy-intensive step from production” tells them why the slide is in the case. “Traction” is a drawer label. “Three customers moved from trials into paid supply agreements” is an argument, provided the statement is accurate and evidenced. The test is to read only the titles, in order. They should recover the investment case. The technology title states the consequence that matters, the market title names the constraint or opening, and the use-of-funds title says what the capital makes possible.

Kanop, which uses AI agents and satellite data to assess and monitor risk in nature-based investments, shared its working deck with us. As our Kanop case study records, the deck opened on the raise and its sections carried category labels. The reasons to invest now came after the ask, and the strongest customer case sat in the annex. The rebuilt deck kept the same facts under titles that state a position, among them “Why investors should act now”, “Nature as the next financial frontier” and “The pricing gap and the vicious cycle”. A reader skimming only those titles can recover the argument, which a reader of the old labels could not. The before-and-after account sets out the full rebuild, and its record stops with the founders ready to take the deck to investors, before any investor response.

Koralo, a food-tech company we also worked with, shows the same problem at the level of the whole company. It co-ferments microalgae and mycelium. Work on a fish alternative surfaced bioactivity in the ingredient, and early evidence pointed towards a gut-health effect. Its earlier deck carried four propositions at once. We kept the seafood route in the story because it explained how the discovery happened, and gave the investment case a hierarchy, so a reader could see which proposition led, which were applications and what evidence supported each. Koralo told us it used the shorter investor story for most of its conversations. That account is company-reported, and the Koralo case study records it in those terms.

Evidence has to travel without the founder

The person who likes the company usually has to explain it to someone else. Michael Dean, a founding partner of the food and agriculture venture investor AgFunder, described its process in his Brighter Future interview, published in July 2024. “We must be able to justify our investment decisions to our partners and investors.” That is one investor describing his own fund, and it is a shape worth planning for. The founder is absent from the conversation where the case is retold.

A claim that only works when the founder adds five minutes of context is fragile in that conversation. A number whose comparison lives eight pages later asks the internal champion to reconstruct the reasoning. A technical result buried in an annex cannot retire a risk in the meeting where the risk is first raised. Listen for the sentences you keep adding out loud in meetings. The best of them belong in the material.

Order matters as much as content. A claim on page four can create a judgement that a chart on page twelve never fully repairs. A cost can appear before its comparison, or customer proof can arrive after the reader has already classified the company as too early. The check is mechanical. List each major claim with the page it appears on and the page where its proof appears. A proof that sits in the annex, or more than one page after its claim, marks a place where the reader has to hold an unsupported claim in mind. Where the Evidence Sits Matters covers the same problem across a whole case.

Technical evidence has to be translated without being diluted. A laboratory result can establish mechanism. A pilot can show performance under defined conditions. A customer trial can establish willingness to engage. An offtake letter can reduce one kind of market uncertainty while leaving construction and scale-up uncertainty open. Each result belongs beside the investor risk it actually retires, stated at the level the evidence supports. The deck holds that logic and points to the evidence behind it, and the diligence material belongs in the data room. A reader should be able to tell from the deck alone what is proven, what is forecast, what is contracted, what is still assumed and where the deeper evidence lives. In practice every result slide names, in its title or first line, the risk it reduces and one risk that is still open.

The raise has to say what becomes true

Risk and capital belong in the same argument. “We are raising £10 million to scale” gives the investor a number and no decision logic. “This round funds the commercial unit, qualifies the product with two named buyer types and validates cost at the throughput required for the next financing stage” gives the capital a job. The investor’s next question is which of those milestones the amount and the timetable in the model actually support. Lyth lists “mismatched fundraising goals and financial plans” among the traits that lead his syndicate to reject a company. The test is that each line of the use of funds maps to a milestone in the financial model, with a date and a cost, and the costs add up to the raise.

The same discipline applies to the whole company. Fronterra develops and operates forest carbon and biodiversity projects in Peru. It already held the projects and concessions that made it an operator, and the investment case became easier to read once the company was presented through what the team does. Our piece on brand strategy for climate tech traces that shift through to the round that followed.

Garrison’s account also contains the use-of-funds page his deck would have needed. “The capital was mostly going to be for marketing. But on the Connect side, it was going to be used for building the MVP and expanding on it to develop the product.” Written as milestones, that is two jobs for one round, a marketing budget for a media business and a product build for a platform. The page would have shown the split Garrison describes line by line, with each fund asked to pay for the half it did not want. A use-of-funds page is often where a structural problem becomes visible first, because money has to be assigned to one milestone at a time and a company built from two businesses cannot hide that in a budget.

The ask itself has the same job. “We are raising a Series A” describes what the company wants. The investor still has to see why this fund, at this stage, for this milestone and with this exposure should decide now. State the decision in the investor’s language. If you cannot say what the investor is being asked to believe, accept and commit to, another slide is unlikely to solve the problem. A deck that does all of this can still draw a pass, and that pass then says something about the company or the fund, which is worth knowing.

Sources and further reading

• David Garrison, Climate & Capital Connect, founder interview
• Michael Dean, AgFunder, investor interview
• Nick Lyth, Green Angel Ventures, investor interview
• Kanop case study
• Koralo case study
• Before and After: Rebuilding a Nature-Finance Investor Deck in Two Weeks
• What 16 Investor Interviews Teach Founders About the Decision After the Pitch
• Start With the Decision
• Where the Evidence Sits Matters
• The Belief Diagnosis