In an age where data is king and its volume and complexity are exploding, Protecto aims to eliminate the long-standing dilemma faced by enterprises between leveraging the power of artificial intelligence while ensuring data privacy. As adoption of AI-building tools like ChatGPT skyrockets, strange data becomes easier to find, manipulate, and do naughty things with. Protecto’s APIs are designed to protect sensitive data throughout the AI lifecycle while maintaining its usefulness.
The company announced that it has increased one $4 million seed funding round led by Together Fund, with contributions from Better Capital, FortyTwo VC, Arali Ventures and Speciale Invest. This round brings Protecto’s total funding to $5 million.
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It slides into this deck
Protecto made corrections to its short-term and five-year goals and specific details of its short-term product roadmap before submitting its deck to TechCrunch. The timeline for the goals and milestones associated with the seed funding round was also modified. Still, there’s a lot to learn from the 14-slide deck:
- Cover transparency
- Problematic transparency
- Transparency of urgency
- Intermediate platform transparency
- Technology overview slide
- Transparency of results
- Solution transparency
- Case Study Slide 1
- Case Study Slide 2
- Competitive alternatives are slipping away
- Group transparency
- Go to market transparency
- Roadmap transparency
- Transparency of questions and capital usage
Three things to love about Protecto’s pitch
There is one lot is missing from this deck, but there are some good things to point out as well.
Competitive alternatives
This slide does not talk about direct competitors (there are one or two). But the company does a good job of displaying this information anyway:
[Slide 10] Competitive alternatives are a great way to see competitive landscapes. Image Credits: Protecto
Competitive alternatives are businesses, methods, or approaches that are different from yours, but that satisfy the same customer needs or solve the same problems. For example, if you have a coffee shop, a direct competitor would be another coffee shop, while a competing alternative might be a teahouse or a fast food restaurant that also sells coffee among other beverages. These competitors matter because they represent alternatives for your customers, underscoring the importance of understanding broader market dynamics and customer preferences.
Understanding and analyzing these competitive alternatives can be powerful as an additional layer of knowledge, revealing potential opportunities for differentiation and helping to identify unmet customer needs. Having said all that, Protecto should have included direct competitors, but this slide is still a great example of how a startup can explore its market niche.
Hello, team
This team slide is so solid – the only downside is that they put it as the 11th slide:
[Slide 11] A solid team slide. Image credits: Protecto
To stand out in a suddenly crowded AI space, you’d better bring proof that you’ve got the chops to pull it off. The left side of the slide has a lot of information (why are the funding, product and customers on the team transparent?), but the section on the right has a lot of great information.
According to his LinkedIn, CEO Amar Kanagaraj spent nearly eight years at Microsoft, including a stint in search and artificial intelligence. CTO Baskaran Alagarsamy spent seven years as a manager at Apple India. I’d love to see more detail on exactly what he managed there (and why this slide says 18 years, while LinkedIn says seven years), but this is the start of a really solid team. If I were investing in this space, a team of this caliber would pique my interest and I would probably set up a meeting.
An elegant solution
Privacy and artificial intelligence can get very complicated, fast. I appreciate Protecto’s efforts to simplify it to a point where most people can understand what’s going on in the technology.
[Slide 5] Get sensitive, private data. Replace with similar, fake data. Makes sense to me. Image credits: Protecto
Three things Protecto could have improved
Pitch deck design isn’t usually that important, but this deck’s design is particularly bad. There are also much more serious flaws hidden between these pages.
These case studies are not case studies
In a 14-slide deck, Protecto wastes slide 4 as a placeholder (it just says “our platform”). He then wastes two slides titled “case studies”. However, a more accurate term would be “use cases”.
[Slide 8] This is not a case study. Image credits: Protecto
A full case study would include a lot more information about how successful it was (did the product succeed in removing all confidential data? How was it measured?), how long it took to integrate, and how happy the customer was with the solution. Slide 9 is another “case study” that is similar: a use case, not a case study.
The title of a slide is a promise that the rest of the slide must fulfill. In this case, I was disappointed both times, expecting one type of information and receiving another. Proper case studies would be really helpful in telling the story here.
It’s not a big “use of funds” slide.
Aside from the covers, there isn’t much here.
[Slide 14] Almost completely irrelevant information. Image credits: Protecto
The company planned to raise $3 million. The use of capitals, however, is so fluffy. Every bullet point here makes me want to ask, “But how do you know it works?”
- Engineering Extension: Yes, but why, to what end and how much?
- Promote your marketing: Yes, but with what goals? Until then? How much growth?
- Create sales channels: Yes, but which channels do you search for first? Why;
- Promote developer evangelism: What does this even mean?
- Specify the category: ???
Basically, this is all just corporate jargon. Even if the founders themselves buy it, investors probably won’t.
Yes, it’s scary to get predictive and specific. What if you fail? All plans and predictions are predictions. We know. Investors know. The point is to show how you think through these predictions. investors can learn a lot about you as a founder. This is extremely valuable – and not optional.
This is brainstorming, not a plan
[Slide 12] This market sentiment is very vague. Image credits: Protecto
There are a number of problems with this slide. The company maintains that it will grow through product-based growth. That’s great and all, but it rarely works in isolation — it has to be done in conjunction with other marketing channels. “If you build it, they will come” is not something in the crowded startup ecosystem.
I would like to know what these integrations actually mean and how customers find them. I’d like to understand how Snowflake and Databricks play into this plan. And what does he think of “solution integrators”?
This slide is a bunch of words on a page, not an easy-to-use, measurable go-to-market plan.
And then all the stuff is missing from the deck altogether…
- How big is the market for something like this?
- What is your attraction to date? Did the ‘case studies’ pay off? If so, how much? Did they continue to use the product?
- Nothing about the business model: How will they charge? How much?
- How can this be defended? Does the company have any patents? Is there some kind of special magic sauce?
The problem with this deck as a whole is that it doesn’t explain why this problem is hard to solve and why this company is the one solving it. Maybe it’s oversimplifying the deck, but based on what’s here, I think I could get a handful of developers together and build most of this product over the course of a few weeks. That can’t be true, can it? Because if so, there’s nothing here. But since that’s probably not the case, it means there’s just a problem with the narrative. Yes, this is a big problem. now explain why the problem is difficult to solve.
The full field
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