Enterprise
Read the pitch deck developer tool startup Okteto used to land a $15 million Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures
subscribers.
Become an Insider
and start reading now.
Have an account? .
- Development platform startup Okteto raised a $15 million Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures.
- The founders hoped to find investors with technical and sales know-how, the CEO told Insider.
- Read the pitch deck CEO Ramiro Berrelleza says helped the startup land the right investors.
Development platform startup Okteto helps developers quickly build apps in open-source Kubernetes environments. And investors want in.
Okteto announced a $15 million Series A funding round last month, led by Two Sigma Ventures with participation form past investors like Haystack, Root Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures. The latest round comes after years of building relationships with investment partners and perfecting the pitch process, CEO and cofounder Ramiro Berrelleza tells Insider.
subscribers.
Become an Insider
and start reading now.
Have an account? .
“Since the moment we raised our seed, and maybe a little before that, we started to build and cultivate these relationships with different investors,” Berrelleza said.
Berrelleza and his co-founders started San Francisco-based Okteto in 2018, and it raised a $2.7 million seed round in 2020 from Haystack, Root Ventures, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Y Combinator. Today, Okteto customers include work management software Monday.com and development platform LaunchDarkly.
Okteto sought out investors with a strong technical background because of the nature of its product, according to Berrelleza. Okteto helps developers build on Kubernetes, an open-source software project started by Google to help developers manage large-scale coding projects. The ideal partners were firms that had experience with similar startups and saw past just the economic potential of the business.
“Sales and marketing are two of the main things we need to scale,” Berrelleza said. So, they found investors that could help with advice on messaging and who to hire to help with those departments.
But for the pitch to effectively capture investors, the founders had to adapt their messaging accordingly, Berrelleza said. It was something they learned between the seed round and Series A.
“Learning the difference between the pitch to a customer from the pitch to an investor to the pitch to a potential hire is very different,” Berrelleza said. “The sooner you can understand this, the better you can model your pitch.”
Investors, for example, are listening for what the team will be able to deliver in the next year, a clear explanation of the company’s vision, and the financials to back it up, according to Berrelleza. And Berrelleza recommends keeping the pitch deck as short and simple as possible.
“My first pitch was, like, 30 slides,” Berrelleza said. “I’m lucky that I have friends in the space that gave me very candid feedback of ‘no, that’s too long.'”
Read the pitch deck that helped Okteto raise its $15 million Series A:
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto
Okteto