The prize for the best/worst startup name I’ve seen in a while goes to Oii.ai. This company’s name is strange enough that Google Chrome insists on looking for the term “oii.ai” when you type the URL into the address bar. Either way, a confusing name doesn’t mean it’s a bad deal.
The company claims to have raised a $1.85 million seed round with this deck. We haven’t covered this round and the company is tight-lipped about who its investors are, but the deck was interesting enough that I chose to break my usual rule of needing press coverage to do a pitch deck teardown.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to break down, so if you’d like to submit your own, here’s how you can.
Slides in this deck
Oii.ai has a deck of 18 slides plus a couple of appendix slides. Some of the slides have been slightly redacted, but the company says it will include all slides so you can get a complete picture of the deck that helped it close out the round.
Here are the slides:
- Cover the slide
- Vision slide
- Interstitial slide
- Overview slide (“Welcome to Oii”)
- Solution slide? with one side of the business model slide
- Problem slide?
- Market trend slide
- Traction slide
- Team slide
- TAM slide 1 (Pharmaceutical sector)
- TAM slide 2 (Retail Sector)
- Market overview + competitive landscape slide
- Competitive advantage slip
- Sales pipeline slide
- Product roadmap slide
- The Ask + Opportunity slide
- Slide on the use of funds
- Closing slide + contact detail slide
- Appendix slide 1: Competition (Llamasoft)
- Appendix slide 2: Competition (Llamasoft)
- Appendix slide 3: Acquisition opportunity
Three things to love
I have to admit that I have rarely found it as difficult to grade slides as I did with this deck. The information is not as organized as I would have expected. Sometimes it works, but often it doesn’t.
Excellent “what do we want to change” narrative.
This slide paints a concise and clear picture of the change Oii wants to see in the world. It’s a simple and effective way to show why the business needs to exist.
[Slide 6] An unusual view of the value proposition slide. Image credits: Oii.ai
This slide is unusual because it falls somewhere in the middle of the problem, solution, and value proposition narrative. In this case, it works because it helps draw a clear line between what the company is seeing in the world right now and the future it envisions.
I like the creative approach and see this type of slide being used more commonly in the future.
A good interpretation of traction early on
The company doesn’t have much in the way of traction, but avoid falling into the trap of leaning on vanity metrics:
[Slide 8] Here’s some traction for you. Image credits: Oii AI
It took me a moment or two to realize that PoC probably meant proof of concept rather than people of color; I like the brevity on the slides, but I also think you can afford to spell out the abbreviations.
Now,technically, only the first-level entry number is the one with the actual traction; the other figures are all benefits and value propositions. THE traction what comes out of these numbers is effectiveness, so the story here is, “In our trial phase, we generated X amount of revenue and were able to demonstrate that our product works.”
In most cases, graphs showing revenue growth over time are better than snapshots when it comes to traction. That said, I appreciate how difficult it is to show traction as an early-stage startup, and this slide actually does better than most, so we’ll count it as a win.
Overall, good visual storytelling
I like that this deck has clearly had some attention to design and that it relies on images to tell its story. Good visuals help a deck come to life a lot, and from that point of view, Oii AI’s deck is quite compelling. Colorful images and fun design choices all work in her favor.
Although, if I had to pick nitpicking…
[Slide 3] The future looks retro. Image credit: Oii AI
If you’re building cutting-edge AI to revolutionize an industry, maybe don’t use a stock image of a GPS device that no one has used since Apple introduced built-in GPS with the iPhone 3G in 2008.
In this case, I believe the device pictured is one of the Garmin Nuvi 700 series, which was launched the same year that Apple started putting GPS into iPhones, and was essentially the beginning of the end for the whole category. Visually aligning your company with a product category that met its very public and extremely painful demise 15 years ago may not send the right message.
In the rest of this teardown, check out three things Oii AI could have done better or differently, along with its full deck!
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