About 2% of Global CO₂ emissions come from pressure cookers, powered by jets circling the air. Earlier this week, I covered a startup, Metafuels, that believes it has a solution to reducing aircraft emissions.
I was able to talk the founders of the company into giving me the pitch deck for the $8 million round so we could do a deep dive into the materials he used to raise the funding.
We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you’d like to submit your own, here’s how you can do so.
It slides into this deck
Metafuels was kind enough to share their full deck with TechCrunch+ for this teardown. There are some minor modifications, but most of this slide deck is intact.
- Cover transparency
- Market size transparency
- Product/technology transparency
- Product manufacturing transparency
- Unit economics (production to scale numbers)
- Unique selling points
- Technology Roadmap
- Business Model Transparency (Production)
- Business Model Transparency (License)
- Commercialization transparency
- Market pull transparency
- Group transparency
- Close slide
Three things to love
If you’ve read my Pitch Deck Teardowns, even just looking at the list of slides above will make you go, “Uh-oh, Haje’s not going to be happy with this – there’s a ton of information missing!” And yes, you would be absolutely right. However, this is an interesting challenge with deep tech startups: If it takes a hot minute to get your product to market, by default there will be a lot of things missing.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a large market size
It takes a special kind of chutzpah to say “all jet fuel” is your market, but that’s what Metafuels does here.
[Slide 2] The gun for 70% of the jet fuel market is bold. I like. Image Credits: Alternative fuels
The size of the market for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is currently quite limited. In 2022, around 300 million liters of sustainable jet fuel were produced and this has doubled this year to more than 600 million litres, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). This is a drop in the veritable ocean of all the fuels used worldwide. There was a significant decline during the pandemic years, but in 2019, approximately 360 billion liters of fuel were used by commercial airlines.
In other words, SAF represents about 0.17% of all aviation fuel consumed.
It’s no surprise, then, that Metafuels decided to start its forecast from 2030. That’s when the company will mark its step into full production and when the market is likely to take off. The major enforcement function is the RefuelEU aviation regulation, which sets targets for blending sustainable fuels with their petroleum counterparts.
Metafuels tells the story well: You get a picture of a fast-growing market, and the company is positioning itself as a critical player in it.
You can learn from this slide how to connect the “why now?” part of your story to broader macro changes. If you know which way the wind is blowing, you can set your company up to make the most of it.
Let yourself wonder about the technology
When you’re building a deep-tech company, the tallest pole on the stage will always be the technology itself. What do they have? you did you realize that no one else could do it?
[Slide 4] Ugh, yeah, talk crazy to me, baby. Image Credits: Alternative fuels
Metafuels has found the one exception to the “your investors don’t give a crap about your product” rule: It’s a deep-tech company that will fail or succeed entirely based on what it’s able to deliver on the technology side. It’s refreshing to see a three-slide set (slides 3–5) talking about the process, how it works at scale, and how the company can produce the fuel at a reasonable price.
A clear road map
[Slide 7] I love the clarity of Metafuels’ design. Image Credits: Alternative fuels
Make it work, then make it work on a small scale, then on a production scale. This is a pretty obvious route to take, but it’s rarely spelled out clearly. Slide 10 then breaks down how the company can scale from 50 liters per day to 700 million liters per day — that’s one hell of a scaling operation.
The main takeaway from this part of the deck is to keep an eye on the future and how you can scale later. Having a clear view of unit economics specifically (ie, how your product economics change as you start to increase volume) is often a critical part of the story.
Here, Metafuels is talking about producing 1 to 2 liters per day and then scaling up by 700 million. This is . . . one hell of an undertaking. And while the production processes and factories to produce this much fuel will be expensive, the cost per liter will drop dramatically. Metafuels addresses this nicely in this deck.
In the rest of this teardown, we’ll look at three things Metafuels could have improved or done differently, along with their full pitch deck!
