Check out the bare-bones pitch deck that AI-powered text editor Macro used to raise $9.3 million from Andreessen Horowitz

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Check out the bare-bones pitch deck that AI-powered text editor Macro used to raise $9.3 million from Andreessen Horowitz

Jacob Beckerman, founder and CEO of Macro, poses for a photo against a brick wall.
  • Macro is a desktop app for editing documents using artificial intelligence.
  • It raised $9.3 million in a round of seed funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
  • Here’s the 11-page, bare-bones pitch deck it used to fundraise.

Documents form the bedrock of office work, and yet, the tools to read and edit them haven’t changed much in a decade. Now, a startup called Macro is introducing software that aims to unseat Microsoft 365 as the office suite of choice for a new generation of knowledge workers.

Macro is a desktop app for editing documents. The special sauce, says Macro founder and CEO Jacob Beckerman, is that it has an artificial-intelligence layer that makes text interactive and hyperlinked. When a user clicks on a key term that’s defined somewhere in the document, a window pops up with the keyword’s definition. The sidebar lets users search for terms and jump to sections, and tabs can be used for viewing different parts of the same document.

Investors have bought into the idea with a $9.3 million seed round, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Kristina Shen and Zeya Yang. Craft Ventures also participated in the round, as did existing investors BoxGroup, Third Kind Venture Capital, and corporate law firm Cooley, which represented Macro in the transaction. The startup’s valuation was not disclosed.

Beckerman, 24, planted the seed for Macro as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he focused his thesis on natural language processing and its potential applications in legal contracts. After graduation, he spun up Macro, then called CoParse, to make a better PDF editor. The company snapped up the flashy domain name macro.com, said Beckerman, after working out a years-long payment plan with the firm that owned it.

Macro released its flagship desktop app in 2020, and signed up testers across investment banks, law firms, hedge funds, private equity funds, and endowments. Last year, the startup grew its team to seven people with the revenue it generated from those early users.

“The nice thing about the clients that we serve is when we can solve their problems,” Beckerman said, “they in turn are willing to pay for these solutions.” He declined to share revenue figures.

Andreessen Horowitz’s Yang, a product manager turned investor, asked to meet Beckerman on a trip to New York, where Macro is based, last year. Impressed, Yang kept a watchful eye on the company, frequently asking for updates and offering feedback.

“He just really got what we’re building at a deeper level,” Beckerman said. When Macro set out to raise a seed round, Andreessen Horowitz’s name floated to the top of the list of dream investors.

Macro is now preparing to release a word processor for editing Microsoft Word documents. In essence, it allows people to work with files using upgraded tools, while keeping the file format intact. That’s in contrast to an app like Notion or Roam Research which use a unique file format that may not always be compatible with other apps.

Macro wants to become the “default” app for handling documents, Beckerman said, without scrambling the Microsoft file format on which millions of people rely.

Read the pitch deck that Macro used to convince Andreessen Horowitz to leads its $9.3 million seed round.