Pitch Deck Teardown: $36M Private Equity deck from Ageras

Most of 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 different.

Today we look at Ageraspitch deck, raising a $35 million private equity round to further expand its product portfolio at a relatively late stage. Given that I am based in Copenhagen, Denmark at the time of writing, I thought it would be a good idea to report on a company founded here.

The company raised $73 million from New York-based investment fund Lugard Road Capital in early 2021 and closed this $35 million round about a year later.

What does it do? In the words of the founder:

What started as an online marketplace for small business owners to find accountants in Denmark has now grown into a financial cockpit used by over 1 million SMEs across Europe and the US, providing them with a single, centralized destination for almost all of their needs: bookkeeping, bookkeeping, payroll, invoicing, and now financial services.

I’ll be the first to admit that very late stage decks are not my forte, and I know much less about private equity than I do about venture capital. But let’s see what we can learn!

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Slides into this deck

At 31 slides, the Ageras deck is a bit of a beast. Some of it was redacted to keep the company’s secrets, er, a secret. However, the overall structure is there and we can observe some interesting points in weaving a story of a company with more than 300 people and a global footprint.

1. Cover slide
2. Slogan dia
3. Overview slide
4. Products overview slide part 1
5. Product overview slide part 2
6. Traction slide
7. Slide customer growth
8. Products interstitial dia
9. Product defect slide
10. Product: Marketplace overview slide
11. Product: Marketplace “how it works” slide
12. Product: Introduction slide for accounting and administration software
13. Product: Banking introduction slide
14. Product: Financing introduction slide
15. Target customer slide
16. Market size slide
17. Problem slide (“SMEs struggle to get financing”)
18. Solution slide
19. Go to the market slide
20. Mission slide
21. (Reliable) Strategic Focus Area Slide
22. (Edited) product roadmap slide
23. Scroll acquisitions
24. (Reliable) slide sales growth
25. (Edited) unit economics slide
26. (Edited) profit and loss slide
27. (Reliable) balance slide
28. Teamslide part 1 (“Meet the founders”)
29. Team slide part 2
30. (Rated) organizations shift
31. Overview slide legal structure

Three things to love

There’s a lot going on in this deck. It’s not all great (and as always, we’ll cover that in the second half of this teardown), but the highlights are as bright as they can be:

Extensive product portfolio

Ageras has been around for 11 years and started as a service to match small business owners with accountants, tax professionals and bookkeepers. Then the company started adding related services and growing from there. That is of course a complex story to convey, but the team masterfully delivers an overview:

As a mature company with international operations, product offerings will vary from country to country depending on local compliance regulations and laws. The pitch deck breaks down the variance in an easy-to-digest 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 clients with professionals, something interesting emerges from that synthesis: it knows more about the financial health of its clients than almost anyone else.

As such, it found it could offer financial services (i.e. small business loans) with lower risks than a bank that doesn’t have the same amount of day-to-day visibility:

(Slide 17) Excellent storytelling around the problem statement. Image credit: Ageras Group

In fact, Ageras is using its data to offer more loans to what the company calls “medium risks.”

This slide teaches us that it’s a good idea to always be on the lookout for adjacent services that can emerge from a strong company. When Ageras only linked companies to accountants, it would not have been able to do this. But as the customer base and amount of available data increased, so did the opportunities.

Some late stage flex

I wanted to share a few slides from this deck as I don’t often see such material in earlier stage pitch decks and they intrigued me.

As the complexity evolves, it makes sense that the company needs an international structure to support its activities in different countries:

(Slide 31) Companies that own companies that own companies. Image credits: Ageras Group.

Ageras has grown into new markets and industries by acquiring companies. The slide itself, I think, has a few major flaws (we’ll explore those later), but its presence in the deck is a great flex for a late-stage company:

(Slide 23) Growth through acquisition. Image credit: Ageras Group.

The company has redacted the data from Slide 19, but you can still learn something from it: Customer acquisition costs remain critical, and being able to report this as a moving average chart tells investors that you know it’s important is, you monitor it and you actively work to improve it.

(Slide 19) CAC over time. Yessssss. Image credit: Ageras Group.

In the rest of this teardown, we take a look at three things Ageras could have improved or done differently, along with the full pitch deck!