Pitch Deck Teardown: Aethers $49M Series A Deck

Launchpad Aether is a real pain in the ass. The company says it has raised nearly $50 million to "extract lithium from previously unreachable reserves." It makes sense: Lithium is a valuable, hard-to-find resource used in large quantities in batteries and other electronics. But the presentation relegates this use case (which is the presentation's smallest feature) to almost footnote status.

It's a very interesting read and story, so let's dig in and see if we can determine exactly what happened and how.

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Slides on this platform

1. sliding cover
2. Mission Statement Slide
3. visual slide
4. Solutions to slide 1
5. Solution slide 2
6. Product slide
7. Value proposition slide
8. Explore potential use cases
9. Technological problems are disappearing
10. Slide "Competitive Advantage"
11. Dragging slide
12. Move with the results
13. Marketing strategy slide
14. Slide "Benefits of Technology"
15. zoom slide
16. Target markets fall
17. Slide with an overview of the product lines.
18. 1 chip product line
19. Product line 2 slides
20. Product line 3 slides
21. Summary slide
22. Demand and utilization of working capital
23. thanks chip

Three things to love

I'll be honest: I don't really understand what the company does. Maybe I'm not tech-savvy enough to fully understand how biotech works. On the other hand, I'm a firm believer that if you can't explain to a five-year-old what you're doing, there's something wrong with your story.

However, Ether did a few things right.

Bold installation

From slide 2, the company plants the seeds of a big vision:

[Slide 2] Create a bold vision for the future. Image Credit: Ether Bio

If there is something you can put on the slide that catches my eye, it will be pretty high on the list. Yes, I want to imagine this future. Of course, there is a risk: can the company fulfill its promise?

Excellent competitive advantages

I disclaim any responsibility by saying that I do not really know what the existing technologies are, and if I were to look more closely at this deal, I would have to speak to a group of industry experts to find out what these types of the data are. the sets are. currently being generated. However, at first glance, this slide is impressive:

[Slide 7] If this were true, I would not want to be a competitor of Aether. Image Credit: Ether Bio

Any company that can demonstrate this is 20x faster and costs 1/10 the price per sample, and 1/50 the initial investment in existing technology, displays a large neon sign saying "industry disruption" next to its presentation . Again, I'd like to verify the claims, but this would certainly get my attention.

Face the problems

Little is known about companies in this space is that there are huge challenges in bringing synthetic bioproducts to market. It's good to see Aether confront some of these issues.

[Slide 13] "Yes, we know it's hard, but this is how we mitigate problems." Image Credit: Ether Bio

In this slide in this section, you can learn how to address some of the reasons venture capitalists may have been burned in the past and explain how you're different from them.

It's similar to how companies in the microfluidic medical technology sector put "This is how we're different from Theranos" on an application chip. It's ironic, but you know this question will come up, so be prepared. Elegantly done!

In the rest of this breakdown, we'll look at three things that Aether could have improved or done differently in addition to his entire deck!