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Collaborative presentation platform Pitch today announced it has raised $85 million in a series B round of funding and teased a suite of features coming in the next weeks and months. The firm is hunting to grab a larger piece of the enterprise pie by supplying what it touts as the very first “complete platform for presentations.”
Pitch emerged from stealth in 2018, 3 years right after a trio of the startup’s founders sold 6Wunderkinder — creators of the well-known productivity app Wunderlist — to Microsoft. By its beta launch a year later, the German firm had raised about $50 million in funding from the likes of Slack (by way of the Slack Fund), Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, and Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. By its official launch about six months ago, it had amassed a roster of clientele that incorporated Intercom, Grammarly, Notion, and Parse.ly.
Suffice it to say, Pitch had constructed a fairly strong foundation of backers and clients prior to it officially went to market place.
Big teams
Fast-forward to today, and Pitch has now raised a substantial chunk of alter from investors that involve Tiger Global, Index Ventures, Lakestar, and Thrive Capital as it sets about targeting “larger teams” about the globe.
Collaboration plays a pivotal portion in Pitch’s pitch (yup), with group members in a position to engage in a live video chat to talk about formats, content, edits, or more. It can even be used to host meetings.
Beyond that, Pitch presents a slew of premade presentation templates, even though it is created to allow organizations to import their personal assets and designs to assure they keep on-brand — and save every thing as their personal custom templates.
However, Pitch is all about extensibility, with integrations spanning third-party apps and information streams such as Google Analytics, enabling marketing and advertising teams to quickly funnel live internet overall performance information into charts and graphs. Pitch also plugs into apps such as Slack (it is an investor, right after all), Twitter, YouTube, Google Sheets, and Excel.
Enterprising
With a further $85 million in the bank, Pitch has a variety of close to-term and mid-term plans to ramp up its solution and appeal to larger organizations. Looking to next year, this will involve an all-new enterprise strategy with committed buyer service, single sign-on (SSO) help, and sophisticated safety that will allow organizations to share custom hyperlinks with password protection, as nicely as granular workspace permissions.
“In our first six months since launching Pitch, we’ve primarily focused on teams of up to 200 people, primarily in small and medium-sized companies, but also larger enterprises,” Pitch cofounder and CEO Christian Reber told VentureBeat. “We aim to be fully enterprise-ready in 2022 and are already implementing improvements to support larger workspaces with significantly bigger teams, as well as meeting enterprise-grade standards.”
Pitch is also gearing up to introduce a bunch of new features, beginning in the coming weeks. These involve sophisticated presentation analytics that will provide detailed insights into a presentation’s attain and readership, like engagement levels.
Elsewhere, Pitch is also rolling out a new “narrative recording and playback” feature created for asynchronous communications, some thing extensively regarded as pivotal to succeeding as a remote-very first firm exactly where workers are spread across offices and time zones.
“For most businesses, meetings aren’t happening in conference rooms anymore, and teams have been asking us for solutions to help them stay aligned asynchronously, flexibly, and remotely,” Reber mentioned. “That’s why the narrative recording and playback tools are a key part of the product roadmap we’re unveiling today.”
This feature essentially enables group members to record themselves speaking more than a precise presentation or slide.
Finding its way into larger enterprises — these that are traditionally resistant to alter — could prove to a difficult process. But even though Microsoft’s omnipresent PowerPoint remains the default presentation software program for most organizations, Pitch hopes its focus on “generation Slack” will assist it continue to develop beyond the “tens of thousands of teams” it has drawn to its platform in its brief tenure so far.
“We’re making it fast and delightful for teams to create beautiful and impactful presentations,” Reber mentioned. “To do that, we’re unifying the entire workflow of presentations: creation, collaboration, sharing, and publishing — all in one place. That’s what we mean when we say we’re building the first complete platform for presentations.”
