Lumen Freight Seed Deck
Investor pitch deck
This investor pitch deck example is a complete twelve slide seed deck for Lumen Freight, an invented company that finds return loads for mid size trucking carriers. It runs cover, agenda, problem, solution, market, how it works, traction, pricing, competition, team, the ask and a close, in the order most seed investors expect. The problem carries an industry benchmark, the traction is one chart and the $6M ask comes with a use of funds table, so you can judge a full seed deck on real content.
Every slide, in order
The whole deck as it renders, one slide after another. Read it the way the audience would.
What each slide does
The cover gives the one line pitch, fewer empty miles, with the round, the date and the founder, so the deck is identifiable when it is forwarded. The agenda lists five sections, each with its headline fact, which lets a partner skim the whole argument before reading a single content slide. Slide three is the problem in four cards: the empty mile benchmark, the cost per truck, the reason load boards arrive too late and the dispatch data nobody uses. Slide four answers it with one paragraph and one line about fitting inside the carrier's existing transport management system. Slide five sizes the market by counting customers, 31,400 US carriers running 50 to 500 trucks, rather than quoting a category total. Slide six shows the product as three steps, connect, match and accept, each with when it happens. Slide seven is the traction chart, slide eight the pricing, slide nine the comparison with load boards and brokers on timing, price and result, and slide ten the team of four with two advisors. Slide eleven is the ask and slide twelve names the milestone the money buys.
How to adapt it for your round
Keep the order and replace the content one slide at a time. The problem slide works for any business that can quote an outside benchmark, so find the equivalent of the ATRI figure for your industry and cite it on the slide. For the market slide, count the customers you can actually sell to and multiply by what they already spend; a bottom up number survives questions that a top down one does not. If you have no revenue yet, the traction slide becomes pilots, letters of intent or usage, but keep it to one chart. A pre-seed deck can drop the pricing and competition slides; a Series A deck adds cohort retention and unit economics. Before you send it, check every figure that appears twice, such as ARR on the agenda and on the chart, and every figure that should multiply into another, such as trucks, price and revenue. Y Combinator's advice on pitch decks is to make every slide legible, simple and obvious, and a deck whose numbers reconcile is the obvious kind.
What makes this deck work
The problem carries a number
Slide three states the empty leg problem with ATRI's benchmark of 16.7 percent of miles run empty in 2024, then gives Lumen's own estimate of $30,000 a year per truck. Sequoia's business plan guide puts the problem straight after the company purpose, and a sourced number makes the market sizing on slide five feel earned.
Traction is one chart
Slide seven plots annual recurring revenue across five quarters on a single axis. No cumulative totals, no second metric, just the shape of the line, which is what an investor looks for first.
The ask is specific
Slide eleven asks for $6M, states 24 months of runway and splits the money four ways: 45 percent to product, 30 to sales, 15 to the shipper network and 10 to operations. It is the slide investors screenshot.
Questions people ask
How many slides should an investor pitch deck have?
Ten to twelve for a seed round. This example uses twelve: a cover, an agenda, eight content slides from the problem to the team, the ask and a close. Each content slide makes one point, so an investor reading the deck alone before a meeting can follow it without a presenter. If a slide needs a second point, that usually means it should be two slides or none.
What order should the slides in an investor pitch deck go in?
Problem, solution, market, product, traction, business model, competition, team and the ask. Lumen follows that order from slide three to slide eleven, so the traction chart arrives only after the reader knows what is being sold and to whom. Moving the team to the front suits founders with a famous track record; for everyone else, evidence before biography reads better.
Does a seed pitch deck need a financial model?
Not inside the deck. This example carries one traction chart, a pricing slide and a use of funds table, which is enough for a first meeting. The full model, with hiring, churn and cash by month, belongs in the data room. What the deck does need is that its few numbers agree with each other, because an investor will multiply them in the meeting.
What can I change in this deck before sending it to investors?
All of it. Text, numbers, chart data and images are editable, a slide can swap to another layout with its content carried across, and the AI assistant can add, move or rewrite slides as a preview you apply or discard. Exports save any unsaved change first, and the share link shows the last saved version. PDF export costs about 1 credit per 10 slides; PowerPoint and editable PPTX need a paid plan.
Why should the pricing slide agree with the traction slide?
Because trucks times price is the first sum an investor does. Lumen's agenda claims 2,400 trucks, and its plans charge $24 to $29 a truck a month, so ARR must land between $691k and $835k a year. The agenda and the traction chart both end on $0.76M, an average of about $26 a truck, which sits inside that range. Check this multiplication in your own deck before anyone else does.
How do I size a market without quoting a global figure?
Count the customers. Slide five gives 31,400 US carriers running fifty to five hundred trucks and the $1.9B of software they already spend, both built from a countable population rather than from a category total. An investor can check that arithmetic in a minute, which is the point of building the slide that way.
What should the use of funds table show?
Where the money goes and what it buys. Slide eleven asks for $6M, states twenty four months of runway and splits the money across a small table, and the closing slide names the milestone the round is sized to reach, 8,000 trucks and breakeven. An ask with no destination reads as a number picked to sound serious.
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