What's in this set
This is a small set, and it is worth saying so up front. The leisure filter holds two companies right now, and they sit at opposite ends of the early-stage range: a $65K seed round from 2011 and a $9.3M Series A from 2020. There is no median to lean on and no round that dominates, so read this page as two case studies rather than a dataset. Both companies are also tagged to other industries, which tells you something about how leisure gets used in the pitch deck database: it is the category a company lands in when it sells time off, not a business model of its own. Tushky is also tagged to travel and events, and Blueboard to HR and enterprise software.
Tushky raised $65K at seed in 2011. It ran an online marketplace where people in India could find and book leisure activities, so the deck is a two-sided marketplace pitch at the earliest possible stage, with a check size that sits at the low end of the angel range. Study it if you are raising a first check for a booking or discovery product and want a reference point for a small, early consumer marketplace raise.
Blueboard raised $9.3M at Series A in 2020. It sells an experiential rewards and recognition platform to employers, replacing cash bonuses and gift cards with curated experiences. The buyer is a company, not a consumer, which makes this a B2B HR deck that lives in the leisure category because of what gets delivered, not who pays. Study it if your leisure product has a business customer, because the Series A bar for a B2B company is a different conversation from a consumer seed pitch.
The deck cards above show the round, amount, year, and a one-line description for each company, and the full slides for both open on a paid plan.
What investors look for in a leisure pitch deck
Leisure describes what gets sold, not how, so investors in this space price the deck on the underlying model. The two decks in this set cover the two models that show up most often.
- Liquidity on both sides of a marketplace. A booking product like Tushky lives or dies on whether there are enough activities listed in a city to make the app worth opening, and enough bookings to keep operators listing. Investors weighing a leisure marketplace ask about supply density in a single market before they ask about national expansion. Tushky's $65K seed in 2011 is the size of check that buys a company time to prove one city works, and that is the scope a seed deck in this model should claim.
- Frequency and seasonality. Leisure spending is lumpy. People book activities on weekends, holidays, and vacations, and a product that only gets used a few times a year has to show either a high average order value or a clear reason people come back. Investors want the repeat rate and the seasonal curve, not a monthly total that hides both. This is where a leisure deck parts ways with a SaaS deck, where usage is flat and the retention math is simpler.
- Who pays, and how much margin sits between them and the experience. Blueboard's model is the instructive one here: the company buying the platform is an employer, the person enjoying it is an employee, and the experience itself is fulfilled by someone else. Investors in that structure look hard at gross margin per experience and at how the fulfillment side scales, because delivering curated experiences is operationally heavier than shipping software. A $9.3M Series A in 2020 says investors were satisfied the model could carry those costs at scale.
- A budget line that survives a downturn. Leisure is discretionary for consumers and for companies. Blueboard closed its Series A in 2020, a year when in-person experiences were hard to deliver and corporate budgets were under review, the kind of stress test investors like to see before they write a larger check. If you are pitching a leisure product, expect the question of what happens to demand when money gets tight, and have a better answer than "people will always want to have fun."
Two decks will not tell you what a typical leisure raise looks like, but they do show the two shapes a leisure pitch usually takes: a consumer marketplace raising a small first check, and a B2B experiences platform raising a real Series A. Whichever one you are building, the next step is the same. AngelMatch's investor database lists 3,400+ investors who tag leisure as a market, and you can filter leisure investors by stage and location to find the ones active at the round you are raising.
Travel pitch decks
