The ‘previous investors’ question
You’re raising a round of funding - should you list your existing investors on your deck?
Here’s the cheat sheet:
Institutional investors: Yes, list ‘em.
Strategic investors relevant to your startup: Hell yes. List ‘em.
Friends and family / Angels: Probably not, unless they have an extraordinarily strong voice in this market.
Your co-founders and yourself: Probably not, unless you’ve invested a huge amount of money. By that, I mean a huge amount for the company, not a huge proportion of your own wealth.
Institutional and strategic investors
The short answer for institutional and strategic investors is almost always yes.
Institutional investors
If your previous investors come from a recognized institution, for example, a VC fund or a respected family office, put their names on the deck. These organizations do not make investments on a whim. You will have impressed them with your potential and met their stringent criteria to be worthy of their support. This kind of trust carries immense weight and acts as a positive signal to future investors. Be proud of it and use it for the leverage that it gives you.
During due diligence, all of the details regarding your previous investors will be explored and examined, from who they are to how much they invested, on what terms, and, as a consequence, what the cap table looks like. The investors that you’re looking for in this round will find out about your previous investors eventually, so you might as well capitalize on their investment even further and put their names on the deck.
Strategic investors
As well as receiving funding from institutional investors, startups might also accept investments from strategic investors. Generally speaking, strategic investment will come from a company within the same sphere as the startup, for example a major veterinary practice group might invest in a pet food startup, because it recognises the potential benefits of the startup to its own operations. The return for a strategic investor isn’t necessarily financial, but it is significant to its business, one way or another. This type of investment indicates a startup's importance to its ecosystem. That is a positive signal to potential investors of a startup’s value and the interest it has generated within its own business space, which means it’s worth putting it on the deck.
Friends, family and angels
While it’s fantastic that your grandmother and your co-founder’s uncle believe in you enough to put their savings into your startup, it doesn’t carry the same kind of caché as receiving funding from institutional or strategic investors. The details of their investment will become evident in due diligence, but there’s no need to specify it on the pitch deck. Anything that’s on your deck needs to be in the service of securing your funding. Even if it’s neutral, not negative, omit it.
The exception is if someone who’s a somebody invests. If you’re doing something related to sports, and Stephen Curry writes an angel check - yep, that’s relevant and worth mentioning.
You and your co-founders
It’s a given that you and your co-founders will have invested in your own startup, both in terms of your time and energy and your money, too. It doesn’t need to be said, so it doesn’t need to be on your deck.
Learn much more
Did you know: Our Ready to Raise in 14 days course will teach you everything you need to know to put together a world-class pitch in just two weeks.