What's in this set
This is one of the smaller industry filters in the pitch deck database, so treat it as a study set rather than a survey. Seven companies, eight cards, with raises that run from $150K at pre-seed up to a Series A of 2.5 million euros. Pre-seed is the most common round, seed is next, and there's one Series A and one crowdfunding raise. The decks were added from 2013 through 2020. Two of the seven companies didn't disclose an amount, so the $5M+ combined figure is a floor, not a total.
Nobody in the set is pitching a humanoid or a warehouse picker. The companies build the perception and control layer: gesture recognition, thermal people-sensing, drone fleet management, aerial inspection, industrial battery packs, and rugged wearables. That's a fair picture of where early-stage robotics money has gone, and it means the decks worth studying here sold a sensor-plus-software story.
If you only read three, start with these:
- Gestoos Series A, 2.5 million euros, 2017. Gestoos builds AI that lets machines read human behavior in real time. It's the only Series A in the set and the largest raise, so it's your reference for what a robotics company looks like once it's past the prototype stage.
- Mero Technologies pre-seed, $800K, 2020. Mero is an analytics platform that helps property managers measure how their facilities perform. An $800K pre-seed is on the high end for this set, and it came from a company selling building data, not hardware alone.
- Avision seed, $600K, 2018. Avision is building a fleet management system for drone operators. It's a clean example of a software company that lives entirely inside a robotics market.
Two more are worth a look. Rovilus raised a $150K pre-seed in 2019 for durable battery packs aimed at industrial applications, which is the kind of component business that often gets overlooked on a robotics page. Omate raised $1M through crowdfunding in 2013 for wearable tech and IoT products built for dangerous environments. Crowdfunding is rare in the pitch deck database, and when it appears it's almost always a hardware product people can picture holding.
What investors look for in a robotics pitch deck
Robotics investors are underwriting two risks at once: can you build the thing, and can you sell it at a margin once it's built. Here's what they weigh, with the decks in this set as evidence of who got funded at which stage.
Where the margin lives
Hardware alone is a hard business to fund. The companies in this set that raised the most attached software or data to the hardware. Gestoos raised its Series A on behavior-recognition software that runs on other people's machines. Mero raised at pre-seed on a data platform for buildings. Your deck needs a slide that makes the recurring revenue obvious: per-device subscriptions, per-site analytics, fleet licenses, whatever your model is. If your only revenue line is the unit sale, expect the gross margin question early and often.
Bill of materials and unit cost at scale
Any robotics company that ships physical product gets the BOM question, and pre-seed founders are not exempt. Rovilus raised $150K for battery packs, which is a business where the entire pitch is the cost curve: what a pack costs today, what it costs at a thousand units, and what happens to margin as volume grows. Put the numbers in the deck, even rough ones.
Deployment proof, not demo video
A robot that works in the lab is table stakes. Investors want evidence it works in the field: hours of operation, pilots with named customer types, uptime, how often a human had to intervene. Avision raised its seed on a fleet management system for drone operators, and fleet software only makes sense once there are fleets to manage, so the customer type is built into the pitch. Any deployment data you have belongs in the first third of the deck. If you don't have any, say what the pilot plan is and what it costs.
The regulatory path for anything that flies or works near people
Two of the seven companies in this set, Avision and FairFleet, are drone businesses, and drones carry airspace rules that change by country. Anything that operates around people, from a warehouse robot to a sensor in a senior living facility, brings safety and privacy questions. Investors in this category expect a slide that names the rules you operate under and how you stay inside them. Skipping it just moves the question to the meeting.
Capital plan tied to physical milestones
Robotics burns cash on tooling, certification, and inventory in a way that pure software doesn't, so a vague use-of-funds slide hurts more here than in most industries. The raises in this set are small, and each one had to get the company to a specific next stage: a working prototype, a first pilot, a certified unit. Tie every dollar you're asking for to one of those milestones and say what you'll be able to show at the next round.
How to structure a robotics pitch deck
Stick to the standard 10 to 20 slides. The order is conventional; what changes for robotics is the content inside each section.
- Problem. Frame it as a cost that a person or a manual process is paying today, in hours or dollars. Robotics investors want a problem that's expensive, repetitive, dangerous, or all three.
- Solution and product. One slide for what the system does, one for how it's built. Say plainly which parts are hardware, which are software, and which you buy versus build.
- Technology and defensibility. The perception model, the control stack, the data you collect that competitors don't have. Gestoos and Butlr both sit on sensing data, and that's the moat story robotics investors respond to.
- Market. Size the market by the labor or process cost you replace, not by the number of robots you hope to sell.
- Business model and unit economics. BOM, unit price, gross margin, and the recurring line if you have one. This slide does more work in a robotics deck than in any other.
- Traction and deployments. Pilots, hours in the field, units shipped, letters of intent. Field data beats a demo video every time.
- Regulatory and safety. The rules you operate under and your certification timeline. Drone and near-human systems can't skip this.
- Team. Investors look for at least one person who has shipped physical product at volume, not just someone who has built a prototype.
- Roadmap and use of funds. Milestone-based: what this round builds, what it certifies, what it deploys.
- The ask. The amount, and the physical milestone it gets you to.
The fact tables on the individual deck pages are visible without a plan, and full access to the decks themselves is part of the paid pitch deck database. When you're ready to send your own, hosting the deck on a shareable link beats a 40MB attachment that gets stuck in an investor's inbox.
Common mistakes in robotics decks
Three show up often enough to name. The first is leading with the robot instead of the job it does; the demo video goes on slide two, not slide one. The second is a market slide that counts robots instead of the labor spend they replace. The third is pricing the unit without pricing the service around it, so the investor can't tell whether you have software margins or hardware margins. The companies in this set that raised the most had already answered that last question.
If your company is closer to the sensing and IoT side, the IoT pitch decks filter has a much larger set to study. Drone founders should also read the drone pitch decks filter, and anyone shipping a physical unit will find more BOM-heavy examples in the hardware pitch decks. Most of this set raised at pre-seed, so the pre-seed pitch decks filter is the natural next stop.
Once your deck has a milestone-based ask and a real unit economics slide, the next job is finding people who fund robotics at your stage. Most of the raises in this set were under $1M, which is angel and pre-seed territory, and AngelMatch's investor database lists 5,100+ investors with a stated interest in robotics. You can find robotics investors who back pre-seed and seed rounds and filter them by check size and location before you send a single email.
IoT pitch decks
