There are times in the life of a startup when you don’t really want or need to raise money, but an opportunity arises so good that you create a brand new round to bring in a strategic investor.
That was the situation Danish animation and motion capture company Rokoko was in the summer. I wrote about the $3 million strategic round that valued the company at $80 million – a round specially curated to let Zepeto buy his way to Rokoko’s pet table.
When things like that happen, you usually don’t need an in-depth deck; the investor is already pretty sure they want to invest, and you are pretty sure you want the investor. Besides, if the deal doesn’t go through… whatever, you didn’t need the money anyway.
Speaking to Rokoko, I wondered, what were they using as a deck in this very specific circumstance? Fortunately, the CEO of the company was happy to share the deck with me. So before breaking down this week’s pitch deck, I’ve got something unusual: a strategic expansion deck!
Let’s take a closer look at that.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to break down, so if you’d like to submit your own pitch decks, here’s how.
Contents
Slides in this deck
- cover slip
- problem slide
- Solution slide
- Slide for product roadmap
- Market size slide
- Market trajectory slide
- “Commercial Flywheel” – Business Model Slide
- “The Rokoko Platform in 2 Years” – Slide of the Product Roadmap (Edited)
- “Conquering New Vertical Markets, Starting with Health” – Market Opportunity/Expansion Slide
- team slide
- “We move on the world’s most powerful human movement dataset” – market trajectory slide
- “Corporate Background” – stats and progress slide (redacted)
- Financial forecasts (edited)
- “Rokoko at a glance” — KPI slide
- “History of Fundraising” – Fundraising Journey Slide, with Ratings
- closing slide
Three things to love
If you’re building a business in the creator’s space, your best bet is to have a nice deck. And oh my god, Rokoko delivers on that front.
Complete clarity
[Slide 2] Problem slide. Image credit: Rokoko
The Rokoko team is all about movement and capturing it. How the hell do you capture that in a still image slideshow? Well, Slide 2 gives you the answer. This slide is an absolute masterpiece of storytelling. By contextualizing a human in motion next to a digital counterpart, Rokoko shows what it does in one side-by-side.
The photo is, of course, great and evokes movement and movement. Anyone who has ever tried to animate something by hand knows how difficult it is to make movement look natural. The two images go a long way, and the text further advances the point: we live in a universe where a wide variety of movements need to be captured to make animators’ lives easier. It’s not hard to imagine that this applies to games, animation films and much more. I like the simplicity of this slide and how much work it does. It’s a great way to get the conversation going.
A large market with large adjacent markets
You know all that praise I just poured over Rokoko above? It will be better. I’m already convinced that this is a good opportunity, but then they’re going to tell us that there are also a lot of extra opportunities:
[Slide 4] Adjacent markets. Image credit: Rokoko
If you’re building a business in the creator’s space, your best bet is to have a nice deck. And oh my god, Rokoko delivers on that front.
It makes sense that creators – especially low- and mid-budget games and animation producers – are a large and growing market. Seeing that Rokoko has thought about a market expansion (and also trades against it) is exactly what investors want to see.
For a lot of companies, I’d push back at this point and say this is fragmentation and lack of focus, but I really like how Rokoko tells the story in this case: they’re thinking health and life sciences, web3, sports, and other uses. cases, but they don’t make a big deal out of it. It shows that they are keeping an eye on things without really diverting too many resources. At least I hope so. If I wanted to invest I’d ask them how many resources they use, but given the way this slide is designed and worded, I’m confident they’re doing some pilot/early testing.
The outlier is “Robotics and Automotive,” where the company casually mentions that they have Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Ford and Mercedes as existing customers. That underestimates what’s going on, but it’s a great way to tell this part of the story. Yes, all kinds of questions immediately come to mind: how do they use your product? What are the contracts worth? How did you get them? What can you do to increase your presence there? How can you bring in even more robotics and automotive customers? But as far as the story goes, it refers to a solid core market (makers) and a plethora of potentially lucrative market expansions. It’s a great place to be as a startup.
Oh and about those makers…
The first time I clicked through Rokoko’s deck, I was confused about the order; I would have swapped slides 4 and 5. But when I think about it more closely, I see what they are doing. Instead of a “this is our core and here are the other opportunities”, they do it the other way around. Slide 4 shows the location of the land and then slide 5 drills deeper into the core audiences, showing that there is a huge growth opportunity.
[Slide 5] About those creators… Image credit: Rokoko
This slide tells such an important part of Rokoko’s story – slide 4 covered the overall landscape, and here the company double-clicks on the creative economy; the extra context shows where amateur and low-end pro producers post their content. And it’s encouraging to see that the company has room to grow into more high-end content, produced by the likes of Disney+, Apple TV+, Hulu, HBO Max, Prime Video and Netflix. It shows the breadth and breadth of the customers using these services.
This round is about bringing in an investor who already wants to be involved so I’ll forgive Rokoko but if this was a more general VC round I’d invite them to talk more about what that “strong growth” looks like as in numbers.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things that Rokoko could have improved or done differently, along with the full pitch deck!
