Pitch Decks by Black Female Founders Who’ve Raised Venture Capital

• Black women must craft their pitch decks differently in order to raise investor money. 
• The stakes are high — their median seed round is $125,000, while the national median average is $2.5 million.
• Insider spoke to six Black female founders who’ve raised more than $5 million about the pitch decks that wooed investors. 

When a historic storm in February blanketed parts of Texas with snow and sent temperatures plunging to record lows, Janice Omadeke lost running water and electricity for hours. 

The timing couldn’t have been worse: She was in the midst of raising a seed round for her business, The Mentor Method, a software platform that helps companies match employees with advisors. But Omadeke kept her appointments with investors, knowing that the odds of securing funding were slim since she’s a Black female founder. 

She learned through research and peer anecdotes that Black women founders face a particular type of scrutiny that undermines their experience and credentials. The median seed round for Black female entrepreneurs is just $125,000, compared to the national median average of $2.5 million, according to 2020 data from ProjectDiane, a biennial report on the state of Black and Latinx women founders by the organization DigitalUndivided.

What’s more, Black and Latinx women received just 0.43% — or $715 million — of the $166 billion in venture-capital funding raised in 2020.

But Omadeke knew the stakes were high even if the rewards were low, and kept meeting with investors through the storm. After all, she’d already persevered through the pandemic, 2020 presidential election, and January 6 insurrection. At every pitch presentation, she equipped herself with metrics that highlighted the duration of her contracts, as well as statistics on the market’s value — steps to mitigate the risk investors associate with Black women-led businesses, she said. 

“It was outside forces plus knowing that it’s an uphill battle to raise in general that made it much more complicated,” she told Insider. “If an investor was focused on revenue over the bigger picture, we would focus on that.”

Omadeke launched her company in 2017 and closed a $1.6 million seed round in April, making her one of fewer than 200 Black women in the US who have raised more than $1 million in venture capital. 

It was a meticulously planned journey of an experience that’s taxing for most but particularly arduous for Black women. Seventy percent of venture capitalists are white, meaning Black women are often pitching a homogenous space and must work harder to obtain empathy from the majority in the room. They must be assiduous in every business decision, from who they select as a cofounder or advisor to the tone of a presentation and language used in a deck.

“We treated it almost like a jazz musician,” Omadeke said of crafting her pitch. “We knew the notes we wanted to hit.”

Insider spoke with six Black women, including Omadeke, who’ve raised more than $5 million about the four ways they crafted their pitch decks to win over investors. They detailed the strategic placement of slides and the importance of metrics like market potential, customer-retention rates, and revenue projections. 

The more data, the better

Regardless of the race of the founder, there is a standard formula most decks follow for early-stage rounds: Introduce a problem, a way to fix it, and the team behind the business. The aesthetics often consist of company colors, while metrics address market value and projected revenue.

Rachael Twumasi-Corson, the cofounder of beauty brand Afrocenchix, had all that and then some. She stuffed the pitch deck she built for her seed round with numbers typically seen in a series A presentation, hoping the data would woo investors.

“Usually at a seed stage, it’s all vision and story, but when you’re talking to a lot of white investors, sometimes they don’t care about Black stories or visions,” said Twumasi-Corson. “So you have to give them this data.”

Her 16-page pitch deck dove into her brand’s digital monthly traffic, retail and online margins, annual revenue, and adjusted customer lifetime value to customer-acquisition ratio. It also defined the brand before showing how it was overperforming in customer retention, which was a metric she said investors often asked about in an effort to stump her. Twumasi-Corson said she chose tables, rather than graphs, to present the data, after realizing investors would question her numbers more if she used the latter. 

She also included customer feedback and the Black hair-care market’s multibillion-dollar spending value, since investors questioned if Black people would spend money on the product, she said. Even her final slide had a number: the company’s 1,670% year-over-year growth rate.

Her efforts paid off: Afrocenchix closed a $1.2 million seed round in June, which included Google as an investor.

Use an appendix to give even more data

Many of the women Insider spoke to recommended creating an appendix as a way to reference additional information, without burdening the main slides with too much detail. 

Jasmine Crowe, the founder of waste-solutions company Goodr, decided to put an appendix at the end of her 29-paged Series A deck to give investors a clearer understanding of her company, how customers were using it, and the success she had seen. Her clients include the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the Atlanta International Airport.  Crowe did this after investors during her seed round would always doubt the numbers she presented, so she decided to create an appendix to provide further proof of her metrics, she said. 

It took her more than 200 investor meetings to raise more than $1 million, she said. To date, she’s raised $2.5 million. “The most challenging part of it is getting people to understand and believe in what it is that you do,” she continued. 

When Deborah Gladney and her sister Angela Muhwezi-Hall were fundraising for their year-old employment company, QuickHire, they included the company’s valuation in their appendix. Investors often said their valuation was too high, so the cofounders showed three different calculating tools to justify their estimate, Gladney said. 

“Some of my counterparts can go out and request the same valuation and no one bats an eye,” said Gladney, noting that her valuation was lower than her non-Black counterparts, but still criticized by investors. “Creating an appendix helped me beat investors to the punch.”

Tell your story the way you see fit

Crowe forwent adding any photos of herself or her team in her bridge deck, out of fear investors would see she was a Black woman and discriminate against her. She was able to raise $1 million without those slides but decided to put a photo of herself back in her Series A deck. At this point, she said, if investors have a problem with her being Black, “they’re just not the kind of investors that you want.” 

They’re just not the kind of investors that you want. 

Meanwhile, Felicia Booker’s deck was distinctive because her entrepreneurial situation is different — she doesn’t have a cofounder or any technical experience. She is the founder of the social-networking app Breakers Nation, which allows users to share music and connect with their favorite artists. Last November, she closed a $100,000 pre-seed round and is currently raising a $700,000 seed round. Her deck had to make up for what investors believed to be a few shortcomings, she said. 

For example, despite having more than 20 years of music-industry experience, she constantly had to justify her connections and knowledge to investors. “I didn’t go to Harvard or Stanford and I didn’t work at YouTube or Google,” she said. “I haven’t had a previous startup.” 

As a result, her 12-page deck begins with a bio before introducing the problem she hopes Breakers Nation will solve. Then, she included the company’s leadership and participating mentors to showcase the team of experts in her orbit. 

“You can talk to every single VC that exists and they’re going to tell you the thing they invest in the most is the team,” Brooker said. 

And remember to take care of yourself 

But sometimes, nothing will ever be enough. Oftentimes it’s unclear why an investor says no — it could be the product, the business concept, the coily curls of the founder who’s presenting, or the hue of their skin. The pressure mounts, making the journey even more strenuous. 

“Even getting a yes from some of these investors was way too exhausting,” Gladney said. Her company closed a $1.9 million pre-seed round in November. “Even the amount of pitching they wanted, it felt very over the top, especially for the stage we were at.” 

That’s because a perfect pitch deck can’t make up for an imperfect system. And Gladney, like the rest of the women Insider spoke to, closed their rounds realizing unconscious bias — and conscious bias — are out of their control. 

“I’ve had people say to me in one breath, ‘Felicia, you are the most qualified person to solve problems in this space,’ but still not write me a check and decide to invest in a person who worked at Airbnb or something like that,” Booker said.

That’s why, when Omadeke began her fundraising journey, one of the most important things she was told to prioritize was not the metrics, market value, or how many Harvard grads she could get on a team — it was her mental health.

“When you don’t take care of yourself, how can you engage with investors, your customers, or the end users you are seeking,” she said. “Put the oxygen mask on, make sure you’re locked in mentally, and make sure you are prepared for this journey.”